Daniel Hillel

Daniel Hillel was born in 1930 in Los Angeles

Hillel was born in Los Angeles to Sarah Frances and Maurice Jacob Boguslav. After his father died, his mother moved with her 5 children to the Land of Israel, where her parents lived. At age 9 he was sent to live on a kibbutz.

In 1946 he returned to the United States for high school in South Carolina. He earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture at the University of Georgia in 1950 and a master's in soil science at Rutgers University in 1951. In 1957 he received a doctorate in soil physics and ecology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 1951 he went back to Israel and worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, then joined the group that founded Kibbutz Sde Boker in 1952. In the late 1950s he led a team that developed irrigation based on careful control of watering frequency and amount, keeping the root zone steadily moist. He became a full professor at the Hebrew University in 1972.

He shared agricultural and water knowledge on missions to countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America for the World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and USAID. He also did research at Columbia University and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He published more than 20 books, translated into 12 languages.

In 2012 he became the first Israeli to win the World Food Prize. He was married to Professor Michal Artzi and lived in Haifa. He died in March 2021 and was buried in Zikhron Ya'akov.