Yossi Yovel

Yossi Yovel is a professor and the head of the lab of NeuroEcology Tel Aviv University.  He received a B.Sc. degree in Biology and another one in physics both from Tel Aviv University, an M.Sc. in Neuroscience from Tel-Aviv University and a Ph.D. in Biology and Machine Learning from the University of Tuebingen, Germany. He then completed two post-docs: one in the Weizmann Institute and one in the University of Chicago before joining Tel-Aviv University Faculty in 2011.

Yovel has authored more than 100 journal papers and presented dozens of invited talks. His high impact papers were published in journals such as Science, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Science Advances and PNAS. He received several awards including the Alon, the Kadar and the Blavatnik Prize and he was a board member of the Israeli young academy of sciences. He was awarded two ERC grants.

His research combines biology with technology. His work on bat bio-sonar has driven the development of a bat-like autonomous robot that navigates autonomously using sound only, as well as several other bio-mimetic applications in precision agriculture. His work on bats drove the development of miniature GPS sensors that allow tracking the smallest animals ever tracked before. His work on bats’ use of bio-sonar for navigation in the field in parallel to using MRI to study the bats’ brain in the lab made him establish a new field which he terms Neuro-Ecology which brings together ideas from Neuroscience and Ecology.