Rafi Bistritzer

Rafi Bistritzer was born in 1974 in Israel

Rafi Bistritzer was born in Israel in 1974. His father, Zvi Bistritzer, headed the children's department at Assaf Harofeh hospital. He served in the IDF in the submarine flotilla.

He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Tel Aviv University in 2000. He then completed a master's degree in 2003 and a PhD in 2007 at the Weizmann Institute of Science, with Ady Stern as his doctoral adviser.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, he worked with Allan MacDonald on twisted bilayer graphene. Their calculations predicted special electronic behavior when two graphene sheets are twisted by about 1.1 degrees, the so called magic angle. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT confirmed the prediction in experiments in 2018.

He returned to Israel in March 2011 and joined Aspect Imaging, where he led a rheology research team. In 2013 he became head of the physics group at Medtronic, and from 2015 he led an algorithms group at Applied Materials working on computer vision and machine learning.

In 2020 he shared the Wolf Prize in Physics with MacDonald and Jarillo-Herrero, and became an associate professor at Tel Aviv University. He lives in Petah Tikva.