Kenneth Hochberg, Rector

Professor Kenneth J. Hochberg received his Ph.D. from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 1976.

After completing a two-year postdoctoral position at Carleton University in Canada, he was a faculty member at Case Western Reserve University in the United States, where he remained until 1986, when he was named a Fulbright Senior Scholar by the U.S. State Department. He then joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where he was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 1995.

Research

  • Professor Hochberg’s research interests lie in the areas of probability and stochastic processes, both theoretical and applied. In recent years, he has published extensively on the following subjects:
  • Branching-diffusion interacting particle systems and related measure-valued superprocesses, and their applications to various fields, especially population genetics;
  • Multilevel branching particle systems;
  • Generalized higher-order stochastic processes and pseudo-processes governed by signed and complex measures, and related higher-order partial differential equations;
  • Roots of random polynomial equations;
  • Semi-Markov jump-parameter linear control systems.

His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (U.S.); National Institutes of Health (U.S.); National Security Agency (U.S.); Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (U.S.); National Science and Engineering Research Council (Canada); the U.S. Information Agency; the Israel Ministry of Immigrant Absorption; and the Israel Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Professor Hochberg has delivered over 100 invited lectures at conferences and universities in 18 different countries around the world. Over the years, he has been involved in the organization of 15 international conferences. He has refereed over 75 professional papers, research grant proposals and textbooks in the mathematical sciences, and has been dissertation advisor to over a dozen M.Sc. and Ph.D. students in the fields of probability and statistics in both the U.S. and Israel. He has also held visiting professorships at Northwestern, Ohio and Cornell Universities in the U.S. and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 1991, Professor Hochberg was appointed Deputy Chairman of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bar-Ilan, and he was elected to the position of Department Chairman for the period 1993-1997. In 1997, he was named Academic Head of the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel (now Ariel University), the largest public academic college in Israel. He then served as Dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of Bar-Ilan University during 2003-2007. During 2007-2013, he served as Academic Head of the National Program for the Advancement of Mathematically Talented Youth, and, during 2009-2014, he also served as Academic Head of the Jerusalem Haredi College.

Since 2014, he has been Rector/Provost of the Lev Academic Center, Jerusalem College of Technology.