Alon Tal

Dr. Tal's career has been a balance between academia and public interest advocacy. Between 1990 and 1998 he was an adjunct faculty member at Harvard University and has held faculty appointments at Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University and the University of Otago in New Zealand. Dr. Tal was also the founding director of the Israel Union for Environmental Defense in 1990, a public interest law group (presently Israel ’s second largest environmental NGO) and was chairman of Life and Environment, an umbrella group for eighty environmental organizations in Israel between 1998 and 2003.
In 1996, Dr. Tal founded the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a graduate studies center in which Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian students join environmentalists from around the world in an advanced interdisciplinary research program. He currently is chairman of the board for sustainable development at the Jewish National Fund (KKL) and is on the faculty of Ben Gurion University. [from www.coejl.org]