Our guest in this new episode of TAU Unbound is Prof. Hagit Messer-Yaron who is serving as Professor (Emerita) at the School of Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University. She received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Tel Aviv University (TAU), and after a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University, she joined the faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University in 1986, where she is currently Professor Emerita in the school of Electrical Engineering. Over the years she has held leading positions, including the Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Science, the Vice President for Research at TAU, the President of the Open University, and the Vice Chair of the Council of Higher Education, Israel. She was also co-founder of a startup company ClimaCell (2016). Hagit is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies “For contributions to sensing of the environment using wireless communication networks.” She has published numerous journal and conference papers, and has supervised more than 100 graduate students. She has been an active volunteer of the IEEE both within the Signal Processing Society various technical activities and in BOG’s committees. Beyond her technical accomplishments, Hagit Messer is deeply involved in higher education and science policy, with a particular interest in promoting women in science and technology and addressing ethical considerations in these fields.
Her research is focused on statistical signal processing for environmental monitoring; detection and parameter estimation theory; and multi-sensor signal processing. She leads the Cellular Environmental Monitoring (CellEnMon) research lab at Tel-Aviv University, advancing research in the areas of opportunistic sensing of the environment using AI and signal processing tools. In this new episode Ido Aharoni is discussing with Hagit her life’s work as well as her feelings about higher education in general.