Joseph Klafter

Professor Joseph Klafter is the President of Tel Aviv University and former Heinemann Professor of Physical Chemistry. He helped discover the connection between diffusional anomalies and Levy processes, leading to theories of anomalous diffusion, a deviation from a phenomenon described by Einstein. Also, Klafter introduced concept of Levy walks, which became a conceptual breakthrough that unified Brownian and non-Brownian behaviors. Levy walks have helped explain mixing and chemical reactions, tracers in fluids, diffusion at interfaces, and others. He has generalized the Fokker-Planck equation to include anomalous diffusion using fractional calculus-known by mathematicians but not as familiar to chemists and physicists. This equation has been used to explain fluctuations in biological systems and the spread of contaminants in underground water. Klafter has published close to 400 scientific articles and edited 18 books. He is a member of the editorial boards of six scientific journals, and has been a member of the scientific committee of dozens of conferences. Klafter is a recipient of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Prize and Weizmann Prize for Sciences and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter (Senior Fellow).