Shimrit Perkol-Finkel

Shimrit Perkol-Finkel was born in 1975 in Tel Aviv

Shimrit Perkol-Finkel was born in Tel Aviv in 1975 and grew up there. Her mother Rachel was a preschool teacher and artist, and her father Dov was a bus driver and tour guide. She was the youngest of four daughters, and as a teenager she surfed and dove at Hilton Beach.

After high school she served in the IDF. She then studied life sciences at Tel Aviv University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1998 and a master's degree in 2001, both with honors. Her doctoral research on artificial reefs took place partly in southern Sinai and the Gulf of Suez, and in 2008 she completed a postdoctorate at the University of Bologna as a Marie Curie Fellow.

She joined marine research expeditions in places such as Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Kenya, Japan, Tanzania and Eritrea. She wrote many scientific papers.

In 2010 she returned to Israel and founded SeArc, a marine ecological consulting firm, with marine biologist Ido Sella. In 2012 she founded ECOncrete and served as its CEO. In 2019 Forbes included her in a list of 50 women-led startups, and Time chose the patent she developed with Sella as one of 100 inventions of the year.

She died in 2021.