Avishai Dekel

Avishai Dekel was born in 1951 in Jerusalem

Dekel was born in Jerusalem in 1951 and grew up in Ashkelon. His parents, Nechama and Yehuda Dekel, were Palmach fighters and founders of Kibbutz Yiron. His grandfather Eliyahu Dobkin signed Israel's Declaration of Independence.

He served in the Armored Corps and commanded a company in the Yom Kippur War until he was wounded. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics and mathematics from the Hebrew University in 1975 and a Ph.D. there in 1980. His doctorate, on the formation of structure in the universe, was the first in Israel in cosmology.

After a postdoctoral post at Caltech and a professorship at Yale, he joined the Hebrew University in 1986 and became a full professor in 1991. He headed the Racah Institute of Physics from 1997 to 2001 and was president of the Israel Physical Society from 2008 to 2011.

His research covered dwarf galaxies and supernova feedback, large-scale cosmic flows, dark matter halos and galaxy formation in the early universe. He studied how cold gas streams from the cosmic web build early disk galaxies. He received the Landau Prize in 2020.

Dekel was married to Tzipi from 1971 and had two sons. He died on November 17, 2025, and was buried in Herzliya.