Prof. Eviatar Nevo
Eibi was born on February 2, 1929 in Tel Aviv to Lea Goldis-Levitas
and David Levitas. In accordance with a popular trend at that time family
names were being changed to Hebrew sounding names and this ‘Levitas’
was changed to ‘Nevo’.
Eibi has a daughter Orit, a dancer and trapeze artist, and a grandson
Oran. His son Tal died in the Yom Kippur War (October, 1973) at age 19.
Since that time, Eibi has devoted all of his energy into advancing scientific
achievements at the Institute of Evolution.
Eibi Nevo studied biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
receiving the M.Sc. degree with special distinction in 1958 and a Ph.D.
summa cum laude in 1964. In 1956, Eibi began his career as a Lecturer in
Biology at the Kibbutz Teachers College, the Oranim Campus. He served
as Visiting Professor in Zoology at the University of Texas from 1964 to
1965, and was a Fellow in Biology at Harvard University a year later. In
1967 he accepted the position of Research Associate in the Department of
Genetics at the Hebrew University. In 1968, he was promoted to Lecturer
and in 1970 to Senior Lecturer. In 1971, he established the Department of
Biology at the University of Haifa, a basis of biological studies for the
planned medical school. However, the Technion hosted the medical school, which helped Eibi transform the early stages of the Department of Biology at the University of Haifa into the Institute of Evolution and the Teaching Division of Evolutionary Biology. From 1972 to 1973, he was a Research Associate at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California at Berkeley, and a Senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Chicago. Returning to Israel in 1973, Nevo was appointed as Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Haifa and since 1975 he has been a Full Professor. In 1974, Eibi founded the Institute of Evolution at the University of Haifa that has become a well known institution of evolutionary studies in the world.
Eibi’s long-term studies concentrated on adaptation and evolution. He
belongs to a rare type of evolutionists that cannot restrict their interests and activity to a few targeted organisms. Eibi’s interests, ambitions, and
concrete studies extend to biological phenomena across life. Together with
numerous collaborators and graduate students, Eibi contributed to a diverse spectrum of evolutionary subjects using a wide range of model organisms, from viruses to higher plants, mammals, and humans. His main
methodological framework is combining field studies, laboratory
experimentation, and theoretical analysis. Consequently, Eibi strongly
supported corresponding activities at the Institute and in his collaborations.
His main fields of interest and activity include biodiversity and
bioconservation; genetic variation in natural populations of plants and
animals at the protein, DNA, and chromosomal levels; natural selection and adaptation; speciation; genetic resources in wild germplasms for crop
improvement; environmental quality; behavioral evolution; ecological
genetics and ecological genomics; genetic mapping, sequencing, and
cloning stress genes in fungi, plants, and animals.
