Chemist To Run For President Of Israel

Chemistry Nobel Laureate Dan Shechtman, a professor of materials science at Technion—Israel Institute of Technology, announced at the end of January his plans to run for president of Israel. The term of the current Israeli president, Shimon Peres, ends in July. The position is largely a ceremonial post and often requires serving in an ambassadorial capacity nationally and internationally. The president is chosen by a vote of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. “I think I can change things for the better in this country,” Shechtman recently told Israel’s Channel 1. The 73-year-old materials scientist, who also holds appointments at Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory, added, “I’m doing it now as well, in many areas, mostly in education, higher education, and technological entrepreneurship. But I think I could do a lot more from a presidential position.” Shechtman received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of a class of oddly ordered materials: quasicrystals, which are ordered solids that lack lattice periodicity and helped redefine crystallinity.