Eshel Ben-Jacob

Eshel Ben-Jacob was born in 1952 in Haifa

Eshel Ben-Jacob was born in Haifa on April 13, 1952. His father, Yaakov Breslav, came to Israel as a child, and his mother, Miriam, was born in Even Yehuda. The family moved to Even Yehuda when he was a child.

He began studying physics at Tel Aviv University in 1970 and continued during his navy service. He earned a B.Sc. in 1975, an M.Sc. in 1978 and a PhD in 1982, all from Tel Aviv University. He also received a certificate in system analysis from the Technion in 1976.

From 1981 to 1984 he did postdoctoral research at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. He then taught at the University of Michigan from 1984 to 1989 and joined Tel Aviv University in 1986. He became a full professor in 1992 and held the Maguy-Glass Chair in Physics of Complex Systems from 2003.

In the early 1990s his group discovered two pattern-forming bacteria species. He proposed the idea of bacterial social intelligence, and his group devised a social IQ score for bacteria. He headed the Israel Physical Society from 2001 to 2004 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014.

In 2013 he received the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences. In his final years he applied his ideas to cancer research. He died on June 5, 2015.