The 2015 Tenne Family Prize in memory of Lea Tenne for Nanoscale Sciences will be awarded to BGU's Prof. Taleb Mokari of the Department of Chemistry and the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology for his discoveries of novel synthetic approaches to high quality semiconductor nano-crystals, hybrid nanoparticles and nanowires.
Prof. Mokari was born in 1979, received his B.Sc. in 2000 and Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 2006 (summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Prof. Uri Banin, investigating the synthesis of hybrid nanoparticles. He was a Fulbright and an Ilan Ramon postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Peidong Yang at the University of California, Berkeley for one year, and in 2007 he joined the Molecular Foundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a staff scientist. In 2009, he joined the Department of Chemistry and the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology at BGU and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012.
His research focuses on the chemical and physical properties of inorganic nanostructures. His group specializes in gas- and solution-phase synthesis of nanostructures, studying their fundamental physical and chemical properties and their potential applications for renewable energy.
Mokari has won prestigious research grants, including the ERC starting grant and the Marie Curie grant. His long list of awards includes the Krill Award for Excellence in Scientific Research (2011) and the Toronto prize (2015). In 2012, he was appointed member of the new "Young Israel Academy". He has published 53 research papers with more than 3360 citations and H-index of 24.
The Tenne Family Prize award ceremony will take place during Nano-Israel 2016, the 5th conference & exhibition, to be held in Tel Aviv on February 22-23, 2016.
