Prof. Efraim Lev

Efraim Lev is an assistant professor, at the department of Eretz Israel Studies at the University of Haifa and Head of the Department of Humanities and Arts at the Technion, Haifa. Prof. Lev was trained both as a historian and as a field biologist and therefore his academic work has always had a strong interdisciplinary focus. He spent his post-doctoral year at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London (2000-2001), and was Visiting Scholar at St. John's College, Cambridge (2003-2004, 2011-2012). His research focus is on ethno-pharmacology and the history of medicine in the medieval Middle East with particular emphasis on the medical documents in the Cairo Genizah. Prof. Lev served for 5 years as head of department of Special BA Program, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa before his current Technion appointment. In his current project, "Medicine of the Genizah People", he created a carefully planned framework of research teams, that reconstructed the medieval inventory of the practical materia medica of the Genizah community; and studied and published for example its original and practical prescriptions and medical notebooks.  Prof. Lev published 10 books and more than 80 referred articles and chapters. In 2013 Prof Lev was awarded the George Urdang Medal for pharmaco-historical writings by the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy.