Professor Ariel Porat is the ninth President of Tel Aviv University (TAU), Israel’s leading institution for higher learning and research.
With an illustrious international career in law and legal research, he is an alumnus of TAU and Yale University. Formerly the Dean of TAU’s Faculty of Law, he is the incumbent of the Alain Poher Chair in Private Law and a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
He has been a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Chicago for 15 years, as well as serving as a visiting professor at Stanford, New York, Columbia, Berkeley, Virginia, and Toronto universities. He is an extensively published author and has received numerous prestigious awards throughout his career.
Under his vision and leadership, TAU has transformed itself into a hub of multi-disciplinary innovation and entrepreneurship. The university’s Centre for Innovation Laboratories (TILabs) combines cutting-edge academic research with industry needs to develop solutions that can be applied within three to seven years. TILabs currently is working on projects in digital medicine, artificial intelligence, computational economics, algorithmic governance, robotic augmentation, urbanism, human creativity, environmental sustainability, and computer graphics.
In 2021, TAU was ranked fifth in the world in entrepreneurship by Startup Genome, making it the only non-US university in the top 10, alongside Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and Harvard. This ranking reflects the significant contributions of TAU alumni in establishing successful scale-up companies valued at US$50+ million (#7 in the world, #1 outside the US, Pitchbook 2022).