Felix Dothan

Felix Dothan was born in 1924 in Zagreb

Felix Dothan was born Felix Deutsch in 1924 in Zagreb. He was the first son of Sandor Deutsch, a building materials merchant, and Lilli, and grew up speaking Serbo-Croatian and German. In August 1942 the family was arrested, but a Croat saved him from a transport to Auschwitz, and he survived the war hiding among non-Jews.

After the war he finished high school with honors and studied electrical engineering at the University of Zagreb for 3 years. He immigrated to Israel in December 1948 and worked in construction and fishing. In 1949 he entered the Technion and became an engineer in early 1951.

In 1951 he began designing scientific equipment at Hemed, later Rafael, and moved to the Hebrew University in 1954. He married Olga Balog in 1951, and they had 2 children. From 1957 he worked in a high voltage laboratory in Switzerland, where he built a measuring device known as the Deutsch bridge.

He returned to the Hebrew University in 1960, worked on plasma and high voltage, and completed his PhD in 1965. He was then a visiting scientist at CERN in Geneva. In 1968 he became a senior lecturer at the Racah Institute of Physics, changed his name to Dothan, and was named full professor in 1980.

From 1968 to 1973 he researched lasers and built a laser inside a metal pipe. In 2001 he received the Chief of Staff award for lifetime contribution to technology, mainly for founding Talpiot. He died in 2005.