Ora Kedem

Ora Kedem (Hebrew אורה קדם, * 1924 in Vienna) is an emeritus professor of Physical Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, and Israel Prize winner. Focus of her work is the study of transport processes across biological and polymer membranes and methods for seawater desalination.

Biography

Ora Kedem fled from the Nazis from Austria and emigrated to Palestine in 1940 to what is now Israel. She studied chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1953 and his PhD at the Weizmann Institute. Together with the physical chemist Aharon Katchalsky she published fundamental work on the analysis of the behavior of biomembranes in the framework of thermodynamics of irreversible processes. In 1970, she was at the Weizmann Institute Associate Professor (min ha - minyan ) at the local Institute of Polymer Research. In 1974 she founded the Department of Membrane Research, which she served as director for several years.

In 1961 she was honored for her achievements in the field of life sciences with the Israel Prize of the State of Israel. In 2005 she was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. She is co-founder of Ben- Gurion University of the Negev. In 2007 she became an honorary doctor of the University of Twente.

Works

• O. Kedem, A. Katchalsky: Thermodynamic analysis of the permeability of biological membranes to non- electrolytes. In: Biochim. Biophys. Acta. 27 (1958 ), pp. 229-246. doi: 10.1016/0006-3002 (58 ) 90330-5
• O. Kedem, S. Roy Caplan: Degree of coupling and its relation to efficency in energy conversion. In: Transactions of the Faraday Society. 61 (1965 ), pp. 1897-1911.
• C. Linder and O. Kedem: Asymmetric ion exchange mosaic membranes with unique selectivity. In: Journal of Membrane Science. 181 (2001), pp. 39-56.