A land whose stones are iron, and out of whose hills you can dig copper. –Moses, describing the material richness of the Promised Land, Deuteronomy 8:9
Nanomaterials are all around us: in the computers we use, the airplanes we fly in, the chemicals used in machinery, and more. Measured on a scale of nanometers—billionths of a meter—today’s sophisticated nanomaterials are the outgrowth of years of research focused on discovering and engineering chemicals for a range of sought-after properties. They are transforming fields such as energy, aerospace, environmental science, and medicine.
Scientists like Prof. Emeritus Reshef Tenne of the Department of Molecular Chemistry and Materials Science study and manipulate materials on the scale of atoms and molecules to create these nano-substances, and those with an applied bent like Tenne tailor their properties to the applications of choice. He is known for his breakthrough in transforming two compounds based on the metals tungsten and molybdenum into closed soccer-ball-like cages called fullerenes and cylindrical shapes called nanotubes. These shapes—with controlled size, composition, and mechanical properties—have exceptional strength, chemical stability, and lubricating properties as well as unique optoelectronic properties, meaning that they interact with light and electricity.
But his enduring legacy is broader. This discovery was the first evidence that two-dimensional layered inorganic materials—molecules not based on carbon atoms—can be reshaped into closed three-dimensional nanostructures by changing their shape at very high temperatures. It had been shown that carbon could create similar shapes, and the scientists who identified the carbon fullerenes were awarded the Nobel Prize. But 2D inorganic molecules hadn’t been engineered this way before. In making this leap, Tenne opened up the field of 2D nanomaterial engineering, with widespread potential for application across a range of areas from energy to medical devices, improved industrial machinery, optoelectronics, catalysis and beyond.
For his groundbreaking work, he was awarded the Israel Prize in chemistry research and chemical engineering for his pioneering research, bestowed on Israeli Independence Day in 2026. Three years ago, he received the Von Hippel Prize, the highest recognition of the Materials Research Society and the highest honor in the field.
In his long and prolific career at the Weizmann Institute, Tenne published hundreds of papers in his field and helped generate excitement among new generations of chemists for a field with broad potential applications. At the Weizmann Institute, he served in a series of leadership roles, including as head of the Department of Materials and Interfaces in the Faculty of Chemistry from 2000 to 2007, and as Vice Chair of the Scientific Council. He established the Kimmel Center for Nanoscale Science and was the first incumbent of the Drake Family Professorial Chair in Nanotechnology.
From the kibbutz to the chemistry lab
Reshef Tenne’s parents immigrated to British Mandate Palestine in 1934 from Warsaw. His father, Daniel Tennenbaum (1911-1964), was a journalist who founded the Poland and White Russia branches of the Zionist Workers’ movement together with Moshe Kolodny (1911-1989). (Kolodny, who later changed his name to Kol, was a signatory on the Declaration of Independence and became renowned for his activism and success in bringing tens of thousands of Jewish youth on aliya). Reshef’s mother, Shoshana (Rosa) Hermelin (1911-2003), cut short her doctoral studies in history at the University of Warsaw when the couple left for pre-State Israel, in 1934.
Daniel and Shoshana shortened their last name to Tenne and settled in Kibbutz Usha, near Kiryat Ata, where Reshef was born and grew up. Reshef recalls his parents lamenting the barren land that greeted them and their hard work in the fields. As a young boy, Reshef was put in charge of the small livestock farm, mainly comprised of goats and chickens. Daniel served as editor of the kibbutz movement newspaper Igeret, which was published in Tel Aviv, and was an editor at the publishing house Am Oved so he spent long stretches of time away from home.
“It was a typical kibbutz household, but it was also a very intellectual home with many books and magazines and newspapers, and I read a lot,” recalls Tenne. “I developed a desire to engage in intellectual pursuits, and I was drawn to science—to stories about explorers, about discoverers of diseases. For my bar mitzvah I received a book about important discoveries in science and it fascinated me so much that I could not stop reading it. Afterward I got more books about famous painters and read them in rapt silence.”
The Gush Zvulun School provided “a love of the land, love of people, love of books, and also education, though like many kibbutz schools at the time, it wasn’t intellectually rigorous,” he says. In those days, kibbutz high schools didn’t grant matriculation certificates, so after graduating, he attended an intensive set of courses at Beit Berl College and studied toward his matriculation exams further during his army service.
While serving in a paratrooper unit of the Israel Defense Forces in the mid-1960s, primarily as a radio operator for Rafael “Raful” Eitan (1929-2004), who later became IDF Chief of Staff, Tenne kept reading at every possible opportunity. “I would take a book with me on every operation and every exercise,” he says. “I remember one operation in particular that was extraordinary. We sometimes trained in seaborne landings, and I simply fell into the sea with my weapons, communication apparatus, and books. When we reached shore and began setting up a base camp, I hung up my English books on a rope to let them dry. A month or two later I took the English matriculation exam and passed it successfully.”
To pursue his higher education, he had to make a decision to leave the kibbutz permanently. The kibbutz “took it very hard,” ostracizing him for his departure from the communal commitment to working the land—a mindset that was not atypical at the time. His late brother Reuven went on to found Kibbutz Mevo Hama on the Golan Heights. The brothers had a close relationship. Reuven was a member of an elite IDF unit and subsequently became an intelligence officer in the Armored Forces where he fought in the heroic battle to protect the Golan Heights during Yom Kippur War in 1973.
“These were life-shaping experiences for our generation, and for me personally,” he says. “Why do we go to war? My answer to myself was the fate of my maternal grandfather and grandmother and the rest of the family, who perished in Treblinka. Whoever does not understand the meaning of that cannot appreciate how deeply it is rooted in my heart.”
Tenne’s inspiration to study chemistry began with his high-school teacher Dr. Avraham Lifshitz, who later became a professor of biochemistry at Tel Aviv University and previously lectured at the Technion.
When he was accepted to a bachelor’s program in chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he recalls, “I couldn’t have been happier.” But his studies were intense, and he worked nights and weekends to support himself. “Sometimes my eyes would literally close in class and friends would elbow me to wake me up,” he says. His studies were often interrupted when he was called back to his unit for operations. Physics and biology also interested him and his proclivity for navigating between all three fields remained with him throughout his career, offering him a broad, creative approach to science and its technological implications.
He received his BSc in chemistry and physics in 1969 and his MSc in physical chemistry in 1971 under the guidance of Prof. Gabriel Stein (1920-1976). Stein, who headed Hebrew University’s Department of Physical Chemistry, specialized in radiation chemistry, electron transport, and applied chemistry. Tenne recalls Stein telling him that “in the future solar energy will be the most important energy source for the sustainability of human life, and you need to work on it. It’s a fascinating field.”
His master’s focus was solar energy, in particular hydrogen production via photochemical reactions. But after graduating he decided to devote his doctorate to studying theory, and was drawn to statistical mechanics, a fusion of chemistry and physics that explains the behavior of large systems like gases, solids, or liquids by looking at the collective behavior of atoms and molecules.
He continued at the Hebrew University, where his doctoral supervisor was Prof. Arieh Ben-Naim, an expert on statistical mechanics and the thermodynamics of solutions. Ben-Naim’s particular focus was the structure of aqueous solutions and interactions between hydrophobic and hydrophilic substances—molecules that are either repelled or attracted to water. These areas would later greatly influence Tenne’s research. However, because Ben-Naim spent many of Tenne’s years of doctoral study in the US, Tenne was jointly guided by Prof. Shalom Baer (1928-2017). He received his PhD in theoretical chemistry in 1976, and during that time had a fruitful collaboration with Dr. Boris Barboy.
During his PhD studies he married Lea (neé Jonas) and his daughter, Dana (Tenne-Fishbain) was born.
These studies took place alongside repeated reserve duty during Israel’s major wars. During his undergraduate degree, he was called to reserve duty for the Six-Day War in 1967 and was part of the paratrooper brigade that famously conquered the Old City of Jerusalem. During his doctorate, he was called to the reserves often, including in the Yom Kippur War where he served in Ariel Sharon’s (1928-2014) division which crossed the Suez Canal. He lost many friends—experiences which he says, “are seared into me forever”.
“I actually wrote one chapter of my doctoral thesis across the canal opposite Ismailia,” referring to the Egyptian city on the west bank of the Suez Canal. “My friends from the army with whom I’m still in touch like to remind me: ‘We always saw you sitting in the tent and writing, writing, writing equations under candlelight.’”
He did his postdoctoral research at the Advanced Study Center at the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva in the late 1970s, under the tutelage of Dr. Eric Bergmann, with whom he had an excellent rapport. After Bergmann left, Tenne spent an additional year as a member of Battelle’s technical staff. The Institute was a hub of industrial research, including economics, physics, chemistry, and metallurgy, until it closed in 2009. He initially worked on computational models of rechargeable electric batteries and then transitioned back to photogalvanic cells to transform light into chemical energy—the topic that had occupied him at the Hebrew University during his MSc.
It was Bergmann who recommended that he consider pursuing an academic position at the Weizmann Institute, where he was familiar with the work of Prof. Joost Manassen (1927-2019), a Dutch chemist who made aliya after hiding from Nazis during WWII and doing his PhD at the University of Amsterdam. After the 1973 oil crisis in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, Manassen began working on alternative energy methods based on solar power.
Tenne recalls: “Bergmann said to me: ‘Look at their papers—they’re doing world-class work in a new field called photoelectrochemical cells,’” which exploits the solar irradiation to produce electricity or chemical fuel, like hydrogen gas. “He said, ‘Why don’t you contact them?’ So I wrote to Manassen, and to my great delight he accepted me as a postdoc.”
Here comes the sun
When Tenne set foot on the Weizmann campus in 1979 to begin a second postdoc, Profs. David Cahen and Gary Hodes (now emeritus) were already working in the lab; they also went on to become tenured scientists in the same department. The lab was also working in solid-state chemistry—the study of chemical compounds prepared at elevated temperatures and which have well-defined arrangements of atoms, like crystals, as opposed to gases or liquids where molecules are floating around. Their focus was photoelectrochemical cells, which typically convert sunlight energy into electrical energy or chemical fuel. The Manassen-Cahen-Hodes collaboration—essentially functioning like a single lab—was one of the world’s leaders in the nascent field.
“I happened to have arrived at a very important crossroads,” says Tenne.
For a photoelectrochemical cell to convert sunlight into electricity efficiently, the surface of the semiconducting material must be clean of surface defects or impurities that kill the excited photocarriers. Together with Hodes, Tenne developed a chemical process that dramatically improved the efficiency of photoelectrochemical cells by using light-induced etching of the semiconductor surface, called “photoetching”. The achievement happened “almost miraculously,” he says. “It became the scientific tool on which I based the next 15 years of my research.”
This work had major applied potential—but that focus wasn’t always well-received at the time. His first three papers were published in Applied Physics Letters. “The department head at the time, Prof. Moshe Levy (1927-2015), told me: ‘Listen, Reshef, you have just been discussed at the meeting of the heads of the departments of the Faculty of Chemistry. They decided to promote you to senior researcher on one condition—that you stop publishing in Applied Physics Letters. The word applied does not resonate well at the Institute.’”
Tenne listened to Levy and began publishing in more classical chemistry and physics journals. He was promoted to associate professor in 1985, then full professor in 1995.
A turning point came in 1984, when Prof. Aaron Wold (1927-2018) of Brown University visited the Institute. Wold was a master materials chemist who studied and created new crystalline solids and helped establish the field of solid-state chemistry. Wold synthesized and studied a wide range of novel inorganic solids, in many cases before their technological importance was fully recognized.
“He was one of the best crystal growers in the world,” says Tenne. “Joost asked me: ‘Aaron works on materials we don’t work on. Would you be interested in taking a look at them?’”
The crystal he brought with him was tungsten diselenide (WSe₂), a semiconducting compound mainly studied today in connection with optical and electrical properties and other nanotechnology products because it interacts efficiently with light and conduct electricity very well. It is a layered material (now referred to as a 2D material), appearing like a deck of cards—arranged in multiple layers stacked on top of one another, with weak interaction between the “cards”. The analogue tungsten disulfide and a similarly molybdenum disulfide were already known for their low friction and were used extensively in space technologies where liquid lubricants are useless.
At the time, Prof. Dr. Gion Calzaferri from the University of Bern had pioneered a particular type of cell that was useful for converting solar energy into electricity. Tenne took with him to Switzerland the tungsten diselenide that Wold had given him and spent a month working with Calzaferri. Within two weeks, Tenne was able to show that the Wold’s crystal cells generated outstanding results. Back in Israel, he advanced the work more with a surface treatment he invented, creating highly effective and efficient solar cells based on tungsten diselenide, with an efficiency of 13 percent or more—an exceptional result. He published the results in the journal he had previously been asked to avoid: Applied Physics Letters. It became well-cited.
Over the course of 15 years, he had fruitful collaborations on improving the surface of solar cells with several groups around the world, including with a French scientist, Dr. Claude Levy-Clement, from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) near Paris, which had a sophisticated materials growth laboratory. Levy-Clement had expertise in how to engineer surfaces of semiconductors (materials able to conduct electricity in a controlled manner) to reduce losses of solar cells efficiency. Together they worked on several materials and porous silicon, which was a popular research topic at the time.
On campus, Tenne moved between buildings during the 1980s and eventually set up an advanced lab in the Harry Levine Family Building, in 1988. The lab included new, sophisticated tools for optical measurements of semiconductor surfaces at low temperatures. One collaborator was Prof. Shimon Reich (1938-2009), who established a superconductivity lab next to the Tenne lab. In 1990, he understood that the conditions in Levine were unsuitable for working with toxic materials. Prof. Meir Lahav (now emeritus), who had established and headed the Department of Materials and Interfaces, consolidated chemistry labs in the Perlman Building for Chemical Sciences in the mid-1990s, and the Tenne lab moved there.
Reflecting on Tenne’s career, Lahav says: “Reshef has always cared deeply about his colleagues and advancing the field in a much broader way than just advancing his particular area per se. “He has a heart of gold and it translates into the energy and love he has for chemistry and materials science and science overall.”
Shaping a new direction
Around 1989, Tenne felt he was “hitting a brick wall” on innovating solar cells. He was eager for a new direction.
On a sabbatical at the University of Tokyo with Prof. Akira Fujishima, a pioneer of the field of photocatalysis during the summer of 1991 (now President of Tokyo University of Science). He began reading about carbon fullerenes—a spherical molecule known as C60 produced by a technique called laser vaporization combined with mass spectrometry in the lab of Prof. Richard Smalley (1943-2005) at Rice University in Texas. He was also fascinated by carbon nanotubes, which have no fixed number of carbon atoms associated with them because they can vary in length; they were discovered by the Japanese physicist Prof. Sumio Iijima, now at Meijo University, who had discovered carbon nanotubes while using an electron microscope.
Graphite, for example, is a form of (2D) carbon known for its black, slippery crystals and forms fullerenes and nanotubes. For this reason, it is an excellent dry lubricant, which is why it is used as pencil “lead” and in batteries. With the advent of new technological methods, in particular high- resolution transmission electron microscopy it became possible to see these nanostructures, directly.
“The scientific question at the time was how these cages form—what is the driving force that makes 60 carbon atoms organize into hollow cages? And then I thought, ‘If carbon does this, why shouldn’t we be able to do this with layered, inorganic materials like tungsten disulfide and molybdenum disulfide?’”
Putting together insights on inorganic materials and the new knowledge on fullerenes and nanotubes, Tenne realized it must be possible to turn other 2D inorganic compounds into 3D nanostructures. He surmised that the synthesis of hollow and closed nanostructures based on 2D inorganic compounds require significant energy—provided by high temperatures—to make the bonds between atoms rearrange in order to bend and curve and eventually seam together.
He began to wrestle with just how to go about this. In 1991, he turned to a Weizmann microscopy expert named Dr. Lev Margulis (1941-1995). Margulis had been a Soviet refusenik who spent a decade languishing in Moscow while trying to get to Israel. He was one of many Soviet Jewish scientists who joined the Weizmann Institute in that decade. “Lev showed me some strange tungsten disulfide nanostructures that he called ‘blood cells’—though they had nothing to do with blood but because they appeared in the microscope like hollow donuts and were rounded in the same way,” he recalls.
The two men were staring at fullerenes and nanotubes, but they didn’t realize it at that moment.
A few months later, the stars aligned when Smalley, from Rice University, visited the Institute and gave a talk. Smalley spoke about his discovery of C60 the hollow spherical nanostructure he co-discovered. They called it “buckminsterfullerene” or “buckyballs” after Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), an American architect and inventor who had designed geodesic domes—lightweight, strong spherical frameworks made of repeating geometric patterns, made of pentagons and hexagons arranged in a sphere, similar to a soccer ball. The scientific community soon widely adopted a short version of the term, fullerene.
Smalley shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his co-discoverers, Harold Kroto (1939–2016) and Robert Curl (1933-2022) for their discovery. The finding was a major breakthrough because it showed that carbon atoms can arrange into curved, closed nanostructures—rather than just flat sheets of graphite or rigid 3D networks like diamonds. But more than that, it added to the scientific toolkit not just a new type of molecule but a whole new way of thinking about structure at the nanoscale.
At the exit of the lecture hall after Smalley’s presentation, Tenne turned to Manassen and said, “Joost, I now know what I’m going to do until my retirement.” Tenne rushed to speak with Margulis who shuffled through his desk drawers to find the images of the tungsten disulfide nanocrystals.
Tenne realized that if carbon can form closed cage structures, other layered materials suffer the same instability if brought to the nano sizes—that is, the material would be malleable enough to form hollow closed nanostructures at certain high temperatures. “That was really the moment of transformation for me,” he recalls.
Around this time, his wife Lea became ill and passed away in 2003.
He would need a very hot furnace. In a shed where the Nella and Leon Benoziyo Building for Biological Science stands today, he and his lab got to work. He focused on tungsten disulfide (WS₂) and molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂), which naturally exist as two-dimensional layered sheets. The Tenne lab reproducibly engineered fullerenes and nanotubes from these two compounds.
And then he began to publish. The details of the nanostructures were exciting, but on a broader level he had done something more profound: He has transformed 2D inorganic compounds into hollow closed nano-structures. The worldwide chemistry community immediately recognized the value, since 2D inorganic compounds that bend easily to allow curvature but aren’t brittle and have high chemical and thermal stability with variety of electrical and optical properties are key characteristics for a plethora of applications.
One important feature of the inorganic fullerenes and nanotubes were that because of their seamless shape they could serve as the basis of lubricants, because they roll with ease. As Tenne points out, “Two thousand years ago, our ancestors used tree trunks to move heavy stones and even today ships are rolled from the shipyard to the sea according to the same mechanism.”
He published a handful of seminal papers on the new materials in Nature and Science during 1990s. “This discovery changed my life, and that of quite a few other people, and in fact opened up a new scientific field,” he says. He notes that the research was done with very simple means: with one or two old furnaces to bring the materials to a high temperature, and microscopes that were not intended for materials research but for imaging biological tissues.
Throughout the years, he says, “this work has given me extraordinary scientific satisfaction, and still gives me delight every morning when I wake up and think about new materials from which these nanotubes and fullerenes can be synthesized and their properties and potential applications.”
To the marketplace
In 1993, Tenne began to consider their applications in the commercial realm, especially for industrial lubricants. He worked on more finely characterizing the materials and scaling up their synthesis. Collaborating with Prof. Lev Rapaport of the Holon Institute of Technology, the team found that inorganic fullerene-like materials made of tungsten disulfide reduced friction and wear in machinery by more than 50 percent, particularly under extreme conditions where conventional lubricants fail. Their study was published in Nature. It set off a flurry of excitement in the media. Large industrial companies across a broad spectrum of areas began to approach them.
With former student Dr. Yishay Feldman (now a member of the Department of Chemical Research Support), they built a furnace to scale up production of these new materials in his Weizmann lab. By 2000 they had scaled up significantly. “We had reached a production rate of about 20 grams—perhaps even 50 grams a day at the peak—of fullerene-like tungsten disulfide powder, which was a huge achievement because it required enormous engineering effort,” he says. At that level, they were able to show potential industrial partners that scaling up was feasible.
After a few stops and starts, NanoMaterials Ltd. (now N.I.S.), in nearby Yavne, was founded in 2002. It is based on Tenne’s fullerene-like materials made of tungsten disulfide. The company was later sold to N.I.S. in the US. It produces additives for lubricants, oils, and greases for the purpose of reducing friction and the wear and tear of machinery, mainly in the automotive, aerospace, mining, defense, and other industrial sectors. Further research showed that adding small amounts of the nanotubes to different polymers led to a remarkable reinforcement effect, making the polymers much stronger and more durable, which offered many applications, including for 3D printing, bullet-proof vests, and safety-enhanced vehicles. In the medical realm, these materials could form the basis of numerous medical devices, including catheters and coronary stents.
The company’s biggest challenge is standards and regulations regarding the introduction of new materials into various industries.
Nanotubes for AI
His work hasn’t slowed in the years since he became emeritus. The Tenne lab’s research output has quickened to the point where, he says, “there is almost no month or two in which we do not discover a new material and synthesize it in the form of nanotubes or fullerenes.”
One of the lab’s most significant accomplishments in the last 15 years has been the synthesis of nanotubes from the so-called “misfit” layered compounds. These compounds are made as a superstructure of two differently structured crystals. One layer is made of a typical layered compound like tantalum diselenide (TaSe₂), with a hexagonal structure, and the adjacent layer is made of a material like lead sulfide (PbS) or gadolinium sulfide (GdS) that have a rock salt structure, that is, cubic. Taking note of their unique asymmetric structure, Tenne decided to try to prepare nanotubes from such compounds. It turned out to be a rich array of a new kind of nanotube structure never seen before.
Since they are made of very heavy chemical elements with high atomic numbers, they exhibit superconductivity as well as a plethora of intriguing quantum phenomena at low temperatures, which could one day prove to be a boon for quantum technologies, including quantum computers.
More recently, he was part of a collaboration with Chinese colleagues, published in Nature Communications in 2026, that created what is essentially a mini-computing system comprised of a web of long nanotubes that cross each other many times, forming junctions (synapses) with a density of 10 billion per cubic millimeter, equivalent to the density of the fruit-fly brain. These synapses generate electrical current upon illumination and using machine learning this “optogenetic-like brain” can be taught to recognize and memorize variety of signals and even images. The study effectively opens the door to robust and energy-efficient artificial intelligence.
“By discovering the inorganic fullerenes and nanotubes, Reshef Tenne opened the whole periodic table of the elements to all these fascinating structures, ushering in the development of two-dimensional materials that is revolutionizing the world of materials today. And far from resting on that seminal discovery, Reshef continues to surprise us every day with new discoveries, like that of misfit-layered compound nanotubes, which could have unique topological properties and make them potential building blocks for quantum computing” says Prof. Ernesto Joselevich of the same department.
A hot field - and getting hotter
While at the time of his first discoveries in the early 1990s, only a handful of research groups worldwide were interested in research of 2D materials, today hundreds if not thousands of research groups are focused on such materials, but mostly in the form of single, or a few layers deposited on a substrate, which have intriguing physio-chemical properties.
But it wasn’t always easy for Tenne to recruit students. Most students are inclined to measure some physical or chemical property of a material or are keen on inventing a new application, rather than studying high-temperature synthetic processes, which are tedious and are primarily based on intuition and trial-and-error. He had a steady influx of talented students from former Soviet Union countries where high-temperature chemical synthesis was common. One former student, Prof. Gitti Frey, is a professor at the Technion and currently the dean of the Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering. Another is Prof. Maya Bar-Sadan, currently the Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Others entered industry.
“It gives me great satisfaction to know that I’ve contributed to the careers of many talented people in the field, both in industry and academia,” he says.
Today, the value of the field is evident. The Weizmann Institute is currently constructing a new state-of-the-art building for new materials, the André Deloro Building for Advanced and Intelligent Materials, housing the Tom and Mary Beck Center for Advanced and Intelligent Materials. (The building suffered a direct hit from an Iranian missile in June 2025 but will be fully renovated and is expected to open in 2027).
He remains active in the Israel Academy of Sciences and the Humanities, where for nine years he chaired the committee responsible for the “State of Science in Israel” report to the government, which describes on scientific priorities in basic science in Israel and overseeing plans for future financial resources to those priority areas.
Prof. Emeritus Jacob Klein, of the same department, says that beyond Tenne’s scientific accomplishments, he made “extensive efforts over many years to bring deserved scientific recognition to both younger, as well as to more established colleagues, by tirelessly promoting their achievements. Reshef has done this by nominating them to scientific prizes which is a tangible mark of recognition, encouraging the scientists concerned. He has been remarkably successful in this. This is an altruistic, time-consuming and often unrecognized contribution to the scientific community, for which, to my mind, Reshef deserves great credit.”
Weizmann: a material difference
As he did throughout his career, Tenne still begins his days at 6 am, goes for a jog or walk across the green landscape of the campus, “absorbing the quiet and tranquility around me, soak up the unique atmosphere we have here. It focuses me for the day ahead. My life revolves around the scientific questions that interest me, and beyond that, I want to hear, learn, observe. I go to many seminars in physics, chemistry and materials, and some in biology, too. And I read and read and read.”
“Time and again, we see that discoveries made here 30 to 40 years ago are becoming new drugs, new materials that improve technology, or new physical principles that drive the electronics and optics industries. But we must remember that true breakthroughs in science often begin with a disruptive scientific question and that requires patience. The things I did three and four decades ago took that long to translate into a comprehensive research field and some real-world applications.”
He adds, “The most important asset in science—absolute academic freedom—is the Institute’s most important asset. There is hardly any place in the world that comes close to offering the same level of tranquility and freedom as Weizmann does. This must continue as the guiding light of the Institute. The role of the administration is to provide the conditions for this freedom, and the outstanding tools and services so that we can realize our dreams. That requires a certain kind of philosophy and solid financial resources, which is why philanthropy is vital.”
Weizmann’s excellence, he says, stems not only from its scientific minds and the environment of academic freedom. He also flags the importance of the research service units—shared facilities with expert staff scientists and technicians who work closely with principal investigators, postdocs, and students on a wide range of projects. “These labs don’t merely give ‘service’—they are our full scientific partners,” he says. “This combination of super-sophisticated laboratories with research colleagues or staff scientists who are extraordinary people, each in their own field, and so helpful and kind—it’s a whole different kind of ‘personal chemistry’ so to speak that makes chemistry research so enjoyable and productive here.”
Looking toward the future, he considers the next generation of scientists and their role in Israeli society. “My message to young scientists is: Just as I was drawn to science by teachers who instilled in me a love for the natural sciences, don’t solely focus on your research but also devote yourself to conveying your passion for science to the next generation. The love of science takes hold at a young age and we have to get children excited by science, both at home and at school.”
As for the future of his field, he concludes: “The importance of environmental sustainability is undisputable now. Chemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology play a huge role in our ability to mitigate the negative effects of the burning of fossil fuels and the accumulation of hazardous materials in our biosphere. It is our responsibility to harness renewable energy sources and offer solutions, like new nanomaterials, in order to generate a sustainable future to next generations to come.”
In 2009, Reshef married Prof. Alla Zak, a former doctoral student in his group, who is today Dean of Science at the Holon Institute of Technology. Reshef and Lea had three children together. Their youngest son, Ron, has a doctorate in physics from the Weizmann Institute and is now an assistant professor in the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Their daughter, Dana, was the administrative head of the Scientific Council for the Israeli Medical Association which accredits medical doctors and hospital departments. She recently completed her PhD in medical education at Ariel University and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Tel-Aviv University Medical School. Their other son, Tal, is a psychologist.