Mark Shtaif

Mark Shtaif was born in 1966 in Chișinău

Mark Shtaif was born in 1966 in Kishinev, then part of the USSR. His father Abraham was an agricultural machinery engineer and his mother Tania was a pediatrician. The family immigrated to Israel in 1973, and he grew up in Kiryat Yam and later Kiryat Bialik.

He finished the Reali high school in Haifa and then served in the Israeli Air Force. He earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering at the Technion. His doctorate, supervised by Gadi Eisenstein, studied gain and noise in semiconductor optical amplifiers.

In 1997 he joined the AT&T research labs in New Jersey as a postdoctoral fellow and later worked as a senior researcher on fiber communication systems. In 2000 he became a principal architect at the start-up Celion Networks. In 2002 he returned to Israel and joined the engineering faculty of Tel Aviv University.

His research covers fiber optics and optical communication, combining optics, quantum theory, nonlinear systems and information theory. He headed the Department of Physical Electronics and then, from 2017 to 2020, the School of Electrical Engineering. In October 2020 he was appointed rector of Tel Aviv University.

He is married to Michal, an educational counselor, and they have 3 children. They live in Even Yehuda.