Mordechai Segev

Mordechai Segev was born in 1958 in Romania

Segev was born in Romania in 1958 to Shlomo and Zelda. In 1961 the family moved to Israel and settled in Haifa, first in Wadi Salib and later in Neve Sha'anan. His father worked as a shoemaker, and he attended Ironi Gimel high school and belonged to Hashomer Hatzair.

In the army he served as an infantry officer after leaving pilot training, and he took part in Operation Litani. He earned a bachelor's degree from the Technion in 1985 and a Ph.D. in 1990, then did postdoctoral work at Caltech.

He joined Princeton University in 1994 and became a full professor there in 1999. In 1998 he returned to the Technion, and in 2009 he was named a Distinguished Professor. In the 1990s he discovered photorefractive spatial solitons and incoherent solitons, and he was the first to show Anderson localization in a perturbed periodic system.

He received the Israel Prize in 2014 and the Rothschild Prize in Physics in 2024. He trained dozens of researchers, and in 2023 he spoke at protests in Haifa against the judicial reform.