Meet the Team

Our team combines experts in environmental health, epidemiology, and public health, with students taking the lead in managing data and carrying out studies that improve understanding of environmental health in the Negev and across Israel.

Management

Lena Novack, PhD

Lena Novack is a researcher at the Soroka Medical Center and an assistant professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at BGU. Prof. Novack was trained in epidemiology and public health. Environmental health is the main area of her research, specifically statistical analysis of ecologically collected data and screening for biomarkers of exposure.

Meidad Kissinger, PhD

Meidad Kissinger is an associate professor at BGU and the head of the Department of Environmental, Geoinformatics, and Urban Planning Services.

Dorit Nitzan, MD PhD

Dorit Nitzan is the head of the School of Public Health at BGU. She is also a faculty member of BGU's School of Public Health and chair of the Food Systems, One Health and Resilience (BGU-FOR) Initiative.

Lab Team

Our students and work group

Nitzan Sagie

MD candidate at BGU. Nitzan focuses his research on the long and short-term effects of environmental exposure on health. Currently, he is involved in projects in the field of oncology.

Uri Levy

MD Candidate. Uri works focuses on association between air pollution and neurological pathologies.

Yuval Arnon

MD Candidate. Yuval's interests include clinical epidemiology and healthcare data analysis.

Ilan Libes

MD Candidate. Ilan's research interests focus on the relationship between environmental and lifestyle factors and their impact on health outcomes.

Adi Shiloh

MD PHD Candidate. Adi focuses on adaptation to climate change, by exploring the temporal trends of climate-related health effects among immigrants and Israeli-born populations in the Negev region.

Kineret Grant-Sasson

PhD Candidate. Kineret's research is focused on using human biomonitoring to trace the pathway from industrial pollution to concentrations of heavy metals in blood, to prevalence of chronic disease.

Mark Friedman

Mark Friedman is a business analyst focused on developing data products and processes to support research services.

Steering Committee

Members of the NEHRI Steering Committee

Lior Hassan, MD, Ph.D

Lior Hassan is an attending physician at the Department of Internal Medicine at the Soroka University Medical Center. In his thesis he evaluated the effect of ambient and indoor pollutions on human adipose tissues.

LIOR HASSAN

Itzhak Katra, PhD

Position: Department of Geography and Environmental Development, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Itzhak Katra's research aims to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature of dust emission from soils and the atmospheric transport of dust/aerosols.

Itai Kloog, PhD

Position: Department of Geography and Environmental Development, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Itai Kloog is an exposure scientist and GIS specialist, with expertise in exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, and geo statistical modeling.

Victor Novack, MD PhD

Victor Novack's main clinical and research interest is clinical epidemiology and especially the effect of environment on human health. Prof. Novack heads the Research Authority and Department of Medicine at Soroka University Medical Center, the second largest hospital in Israel. He serves as a Vice Dean for innovation at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Nadav Davidovitch MD, Ph.D

Prof. Nadav Davidovitch is an Israeli public health physician, epidemiologist, and professor. He serves as the director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is the chair of Israel's Association of Public Health Physicians.

Tamar Wainstock, PhD

Tamar Wainstock is a researcher and an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences at BGU. Perinatal and Environmental Epidemiology are her main research focus, specifically the effect of prenatal exposures on pregnancy complications, and offspring and maternal health throughout life.

Mark Last, PhD

Mark Last is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, the Founding Director of the Data Science Research Center at BGU, and the Head of the Statistics and Data Analysis Program. His main research interests include data stream mining, multi-lingual and cross-lingual text mining, cyber intelligence, computer vision, and medical informatics.

Jacob Moran-Gilad, MD MPH

Prof. Jacob Moran-Gilad earned his medical degree and Master's degree in public health at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel to which he is currently affiliated as tenured Full Professor. He is the PI of the MAGICAL group (Microbiology, Advanced Genomics and Infection Control Application Laboratory).

Gal Ifergane MD, PhD

Prof. Ifergane is a neurologist. clinician, researcher, and innovator. He is the Head of the Neurology Department at Soroka Medical Center.

Collaborators

Our team from partnering organizations

Raanan Raz, PhD

Environmental epidemiologist at the Braun School of Public Health and Community Medicine, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Raanan Raz's research interests include the relationship between environmental exposures and child development, climate change, and causal inference in epidemiology.

Isabella Karakis, PhD

Environmental Epidemiology Department, Israel Ministry of Health

Isabella Karakis is an environmental epidemiologist and the head of the department of environmental epidemiology the Israel Ministry of Health.

At her work, Dr. Karakis is closely working with the policy makers, handling real-life questions related to hazardous environment in Israel on a daily basis. Dr. Karakis has founded the climate change adaptation program of medical system in Israel and initiated dozens of database and field studies in environmental epidemiology at a national and local level. Human biomonitoring represents one of her leading research questions.

Maayan Yitzhak-Sade, PhD

Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Dr. Yitzhak-Sade's research interests are cardiovascular and metabolic health, joint effects of urban and built environment exposures, and modification of these effects by individual and neighborhood socioeconomic factors. She applies mixture analysis methods to investigate the links between multiple concurrent environmental exposures and cardiovascular diseases and risk factors.

Alexandra Shtein, PhD

Department of Environmental Health at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health

Dr Shtein's postdoctoral research deals with improving air pollution estimations over the contiguous US using satellite-based observations and machine learning models. Alexandra Shtein’s PhD, in the Geography and Environmental Development of Ben-Gurion University, focused on developing a statistical hybrid modeling approach that aims to provide spatiotemporally resolved estimates of particulate matter (PM) pollutants over Israel and Italy.