Ariel Munitz

Ariel Munitz was born in 1975 in Israel

Ariel Munitz was born on 27 January 1975 and grew up in the Bayit VeGan neighborhood of Jerusalem. He attended the Netiv Meir yeshiva high school. His family lived in Johannesburg from 1977 to 1981 and in New York from 1986 to 1988 on a family mission.

He joined the IDF in 1993 and finished the infantry officers course with distinction. He served as an officer in the Maglan unit from 1995 to 1997 and received a certificate of excellence from the Chief of Staff for operational activity.

In 1998 he began a B.Sc.Med in basic medical sciences at the Hebrew University and continued on a direct track to a PhD in pharmacology. His doctoral work, supervised by Francesca Levi-Schaffer, dealt with receptors that inhibit eosinophils in allergic diseases. In 2006 he began postdoctoral training with Marc Rothenberg at Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio.

In 2009 he returned to Israel as a senior lecturer at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine. He later became an associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2017. He holds the Roberts-Guthman Chair in Immunopharmacology and served as an editor of The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology from 2014 to 2019.

In 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, he opposed government lockdown policy and helped draft the Common Sense model, which called for focused protection of groups at risk. In April 2020 he started a coronavirus testing lab at Tel Aviv University and later helped set up a central testing lab in the Omer industrial zone with Electra. He lives in Jerusalem, is married to Kinneret and has 3 children.