Dean, Leon H. Charney School of Marine Sciences

Prof. Ilana Berman-Frank joined the University of Haifa in 2018 as Head of the Charney School of Marine Sciences, after having served more than 15 years as a faculty member at the Faculty of Life Sciences in Bar Ilan University. She immigrated to Israel from the US as a child and after completing high-school and her army service returned to complete her BSc in Biology and Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. Prof. Berman-Frank returned to Israel to pursue her PhD jointly at Bar Ilan and the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research (IOLR), as well as an initial post-doctoral fellowship at Hebrew University and completed her postdoc at the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, NJ. Upon completion, she returned to Bar Ilan University to head the Aquatic Ecology and Biological Oceanography laboratory.

Her research examines the impact of global changes on aquatic food-webs – from Lake Kinneret to the Mediterranean and Red Sea, as well as South Pacific Ocean. As principal investigator of a large international interdisciplinary project (with co-PIs from Texas A&M, the Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research (IOLR), and MERCI consortium comprised of experts from leading Israeli universities, the Berman-Frank laboratory helped establish and deploy the first deep-sea tethered mooring in the Levantine basin of the eastern Mediterranean, which uses an array of instruments to measure physical, chemical and biological parameters in real-time.

In addition to active research and teaching activities, Prof. Berman-Frank served as: President of the Israeli Association of Aquatic Sciences; Chair of the Education Committee, Mediterranean Sea Research Center of Israel (MERCI – a consortium of Israeli Universities focusing on Mediterranean Sea research and education);  Co-Chair of the International Group of Aquatic Primary Productivity (GAP); member of the International Association of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) ethics and scientific organizing committees; member of the Board of Directors for “EcoOcean” an environmental NGO promoting marine research and education. She recently organized “Environmental Issues Know no Boundaries”, an international course sponsored by EcoOcean and held in Italy, bringing together graduate students from Mediterranean countries in conflict to work jointly on marine and environmental issues affecting us all beyond national borders.

Ilana Berman-Frank has four daughters and two grandchildren. She lives on Kibbutz Kfar Hanassi in the Upper Galilee.