Prof. Moshe Kaveh, an internationally-recognized physicist, has devoted a lifetime to the development of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Before assuming the presidency in 1996, Prof. Kaveh served as Chairman of the Physics Department, as Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences (currently, Faculty of Exact Sciences), and as Rector of the university. He also completed his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees at Bar-Ilan University.
As Rector, Prof. Kaveh initiated reform in almost every branch of academic programming and research at the university, including the introduction of fast-tracking for advanced degree students, an amplified scholarship system for doctoral candidates, a revamped program in basic Jewish studies, inter-disciplinary centers of excellence fusing Jewish and general studies, and the expansion of Bar-Ilan's five regional colleges across Israel. With visionary perspective and steely resolve, Kaveh set out an ambitious program "to turn Bar-Ilan into the Harvard of Israel".
Prof. Kaveh has published some 300 scholarly articles relating to solid state physics, disordered systems and theories of chaos in matter, and the miniaturization of electronic devices. In 1971, Kaveh received international attention for his doctoral thesis disproving the "Bloch Law", set in 1928 by Nobel Laureate Prof. Felix Bloch regarding the electrical conductivity of metals. In 1979 Kaveh, together with Nobel Laureate Sir Nevill Mott of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, developed a new approach in transforming insulators into metals. For this, Kaveh received a special award from the Royal Society of England. In the late 1980s, Kaveh was party to the development of a new field in physics relating to the localization of light and light 'memory', together with Bar-Ilan colleagues Profs. Freund and Rosenblue. In 1996, he was elected a foreign member of the Russian Federation Academy of Sciences.
Prof. Kaveh is also Chief Scientist of the 'Cellscan' project for the early detection of cancer. The Cellscan instrument, exhibited at Expo '92, was rated one of the ten major scientific inventions of the decade. Prof. Kaveh has been a visiting fellow at the Royal Society of England, and at Pennsylvania and Cambridge universities. At the latter institution, Prof. Kaveh heads a joint project on the physics of microstructures, a subject with important technological applications. Prof. Kaveh is particularly proud of his Ph.D. students at Bar-Ilan, several of whom have become well-known scientists in their own right.
Kaveh is considered responsible for the large number of top-flight Russian scientists that have found a home at Bar-Ilan. In 1990 Kaveh traveled to Russia and hand-picked twenty-five Russian specialists in electro-optics, micro-electronics and semi-conductor physics. Bringing them and their families to Israel, Kaveh then founded the Jack and Pearl Resnick Institute of Advanced Technology at Bar-Ilan, a home for the absorption and retraining of outstanding Russian immigrant scientists and graduate students.
Kaveh was born in 1943 in Tashkent, where his family had fled in 1939 from a small town near Warsaw. His father, Rabbi David Kaveh, was the only one of 11 siblings to survive the Holocaust. The Kavehs immigrated to Israel in 1950. Moshe Kaveh studied in Petah Tikva religious schools, and served in the Israel Defense Forces's Nahal brigade, interspersed with periods of agricultural work at two kibbutz settlements in the Galilee. Three of Prof. Kaveh's four children have studied at Bar-Ilan.