Moshe Abeles
Moshe Abeles (; born 1936 in Tel Aviv) is an Israeli brain researcher and neurophysiologist. He is emeritus professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the Life Science Faculty of Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan. Biography. Moshe Abeles is born in 1936 in Tel Aviv, then Mandatory Palestine, now in Israel. His father,dr. Walter Abeles (1903-1985) was physician, political activist and diplomat, who led the Jerusalem District direction of Clalit Health Services and in the 1960's years was Israel's ambassador to Colombia and then to Costa Rica and Nicaragua. The mother, Cecilia  born Nehamkis, was clothing designer and voluntary teacher of sewing at schools for poverty-stricken girls in Jerusalem În 1947 Abeles moved with his family to Jerusalem and learned at the Hebrew University Secondary School. then Abeles served in the Nahal paratroopers and in 1956 began medicine studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the first years of his studies there Abeles distinguished himself in mathematics, physics and chemistry and became interested in physiology. After four years of medicine studies he devoted himself to research. În 1960 he received his M.Sc. for a work on the influence of respiration  on EEG waves under the direction of Professor Yonathan Magnes, who also supervised în 1966 his doctoral dissertation on Mechanisms of EEG Synchronization and De-synchronization. In 1977-1980 and again in 1984-1994 Moshe Abeles was the director of the Israeli National Institute of Neurobiology. He specialized in Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, then became lecturer, senior lecturer, associate professor and full professor of Neurophysiology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Prof. Abeles served also as Director of the Department of Physiology at the Hebrew University, as Head of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation, as Head of  the Life Sciences Section of the Israel Science Foundation, and Director of the Gonda Brain Research Center at Bar Ilan University. Abeles research focuses on the functional circuits in the cerebral cortex. His physiological findings and his models about the functional significance of temporal relations in the cortex led to the "synfire chain theory" about how information processing can be carried out through the coordinated dynamic activity of cell assemblies. In 2005 Abeles has founded the Gonda Multidisiciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University, and directed it until 2011. Abeles is the author of several highly cited books in  neuroscience, including "Corticonics: Neural circuits of the cerebral cortex" (1991) and 'Local Cortical Circuits: An Electrophysiological Study" (2012).