Ilan Chet - Biography#

Born in Haifa in 1939, Prof. Ilan Chet completed his doctoral work in microbiology at the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, based in Rehovot. Prof. Chet’s research predominantly deals with the biological control of plant disease, focusing more specifically on environment friendly microorganisms that contribute to reduce the use of pesticides. He has published more than 390 articles in international scientific journals, edited five books in his field of research, held 38 patents, and trained more than 30 Ph.D. and 55 M.Sc. students.

This particularly prolific career makes him a highly renowned and respected scholar in the spheres of Higher Education and of Research, at both national and at international levels. This renown is exemplified, amongst other things, by the list of remarkably prestigious positions Prof. Chet has successively held. Indeed, Founding Director of the Otto Warburg Minerva Center for Agricultural Biotechnology (1983 – 1986), he was also appointed as Dean of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot (1986 – 1989) and as Vice President for Research and Development of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1991 – 2001). Moreover, from 2001 to 2006 Prof. Chet was nominated President of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, where he also served as an “Institute Professor” in 2005. Prof. Chet has then returned to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in order to retrieve his position of professor in the Faculty of Agriculture.

He served as Chairman of the Health & Environment Fund since 2008, and was invited as visiting professor to the universities of Harvard, Colorado State, Cornell, and Rutgers in the United States, and to the universities of Goettingen in Germany and also of Lund in Sweden. He later held the position of Senior Scientist at DuPont in Delaware, USA and was a member of the Scientific Advisory Committees of both the European Union and NATO. He has been a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 1998.

It is therefore in the course of an exhaustive and prestigious career that Prof. Ilan Chet was appointed Deputy Secretary General for Higher Education and Research in the Secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean in 2010.