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About the President | Office of the President

About the President

 

Prof. Asher Cohen

The President of the Hebrew University Prof. Asher Cohen is the fourteenth President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a position he has held since September 1, 2017.


Prior to serving as President, Prof. Cohen was the Hebrew University’s Rector, a position he held for five years. In his capacity as Rector he led important initiatives, among them recruiting top researchers from Israel and abroad, opening new and innovative academic programs, refreshing the University’s curricula, and developing in-depth processes for continual improvement of student's education, in cooperation with the Student's Union.
After graduating from the Hebrew University with a B.A. in Economics and an M.A. in Psychology, Prof. Cohen completed his doctoral and post-doctoral studies at the University of Oregon in the United States. He served as a Senior Lecturer at Indiana University before returning in the early 1990s to the Hebrew University’s Department of Psychology, in the Faculty of Social Sciences. From 2008 to 2012, he served as the head of the Department of Psychology.


Prof. Cohen’s research in the cognitive sciences focuses on the relationship between the human perception system and human response mechanisms in situations that require very fast motor responses. In the framework of his research, Prof. Cohen developed a theoretical model that successfully predicts the situations in which performing two tasks simultaneously will lead to a decline in abilities.