Uri Alon Is Coming To Town

Years ago, when my department just got founded, Marc tried really hard to recruit Uri Alon from Weizmann institute, to our department. After few visits, Uri decided to stay in Israel, and our department, recruit one of his postdoc, Galit Lahav, instead.

Today, Uri gives a spontaneous theory lunch, and officially begins his "TWO-YEAR-LONG" sabbatical studies in our department. It is really a great news. Aaron joked that the impact factors of our department is going to be sky-high! When others ask who is in our department, now we can say loudly that we have Uri Alon! Ha-ha.

Uri have a very good talk this noon. He is interested in the "scientific part" and "non-scientific part" in sciences, that is, objective v.s. subjective, rational v.s. emotional, and mind v.s. body. Usually people focus on the former way more than the latter, but Uri addressed that the non-scientific part could be even more important than the scientific part, for instance, being a mentor guiding a mentee. Uri speaks in a slowly softly way, with his Hebrew accent, completely showing his strong charisma.

In Galit's introduction, she mentioned when she begun her project in Uri's lab, there is no microscopy facility for her study, so she went to Rockefeller University for 4 weeks doing all the imaging work. The whole thing was a disaster. Everything went wrong in every possible way. After three weeks, Galit called Uri and promised that she would work very very hard to figure it our and have some data. Uri then asked Galit that had she been to any Broadway show in New York?

"No"

"How about those famous museums?"

"No"

"Any good restaurant?"

"No~, Uri, listen, you don't understand. I was working extremely hard and almost living in the lab for last three weeks..."

"Okay, now do what I say. Take out all your cells from the incubator, and bleach it." interrupted bu Uri on the phone, "Go out. Take a look of the city and enjoy it. When you come back fresh, we can solve the problems. Everything will be alright."

Then you can see the watery eyes on Uri's face.

We will see what Uri can bring to the department in next two years.