Prof. Rivka Carmi served as President of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev between 2006-2018 and prior to that as the dean of its Faculty of Health Sciences.  She is a board-certified pediatrician, neonatologist and medical geneticist, who served as the Director of the Genetics Institute at the Soroka University Medical Center.

Prof. Carmi’s research, with over 150 publications, focused on the delineation of the clinical manifestations and molecular basis of genetic diseases in the Negev Arab-Bedouin population, where she identified 12 new genes and delineated 2 new syndromes, one of which bears her name (OMIM #226730).

Prof. Carmi has been awarded many prizes, including honorary doctorate degrees from Dalhousie and Brandeis Universities. In 2015, she was declared an honorary Commander of the British Empire in the name of Queen Elizabeth II and in 2020 she received the Landau Lifetime Award in Medicine.

Prof. Carmi serves as the Founding President of the Israeli National Academy of Science in Medicine by the Israeli Medical Association.  She also serves as Chairwoman of TELEM (the Council for National Research Infrastructures) committee for Bio-convergence, Chairwoman of the Public Council of NATAL, an organization that deals with post trauma victims of national terror, and serves on various boards leading initiatives in the bio-medical/health tech fields, medical education, advancement of women and more.