Prof. Emeritus Yosef (Yossi) Mizrahi was born in Tel Aviv and has a PhD in botany from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He joined the Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research in 1968. During his career he worked on the domestication of the pitanga and other wild fruit trees as new crops, on new varieties of cherry tomatoes and much more.
Prof. Naftali Lazarovitch was born in Rehovot. He has a PhD in soil and water sciences from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and joined the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research in 2006. His research focuses on water flow and solute transport in the soil-plantatmosphere system, including increasing agricultural water use efficiency.
