Josef Klafter

Josef Klafter was born in 1945 in Tel Aviv

Klafter was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to parents from Slovakia who came to Palestine in 1939 as part of Aliyah Bet. He went to elementary and high school in Rishon LeZion. He is married to Pirchia and has 2 children.

He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in physics at Bar-Ilan University, finishing in 1969. In 1978 he completed a PhD in chemistry at Tel Aviv University under Joshua Jortner. He then did postdoctoral work in chemistry at MIT and worked at Exxon's research and engineering unit from 1980 to 1987.

In 1987 he joined the School of Chemistry at Tel Aviv University and became a full professor in 1989. His research deals with random processes in complex systems and anomalous diffusion. With Robert Silbey he derived the continuous-time random walk equation, and with Michael Shlesinger he introduced Lévy walks and proposed their use in searching for hidden targets.

From 2002 he chaired the Israel Science Foundation. In 2009 he was elected the eighth president of Tel Aviv University, was elected to a second term in 2014, and served until 2019. He expanded the campus and built ties with Tsinghua University and institutions in India, Europe and the US.

He received the Israel Prize in Chemistry and Physics in 2020. Since 2021 he has been academic chair of Tel Aviv Youth University, and since 2023 he has chaired the executive committee of the Israel Science Foundation.