The University’s Board of Governors at its 26th annual meeting in June voted unanimously to re-elect Prof. Yehuda Hayuth as President of the University. His new four-year term of office takes effect next February.

A world authority on shipping and ports, Hayuth is the first University of Haifa president to have won re-election for a second term.

In his acceptance speech, the President pledged to turn the liberal arts institution to the future development directions of the Israel society and economy. This means responding to the great demand for computer sciences and high-tech subjects.

Toward that end, the University last year split its mathematics and computer courses into two separate departments. IBM is shortly to build a research center, one of its few outside the United States, on the Haifa campus. A modernistic design has already has already been chosen for the new IBM building, and construction is to start this fall.

In the past, the young university has been a pioneer in social areas, such as immigrant absorption and bridging gaps, whether between Jews or between Jews and Arabs. More recently, the University of Haifa has sought to involve itself in education cum business/industry areas, such as tourism, technology incubators, and strategic planning for computer sciences.

Jerusalem-born, Yehuda Hayuth fought as a paratrooper in the battle for the Old City in the Six Day War. His family moved to the Haifa area, and he earned his undergraduate degree at the then-fledgling University. The institution’s future head went on to gain a doctorate in ports and maritime transportation planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. Years later, he returned to that West Coast state as a consultant to the Port of Seattle and as a visiting professor at his alma mater.

Prior to his doctoral studies, he devoted a year as a regional planner for the United Nations in Thailand. After receiving his Ph.D., he taught at the University of Rhode Island.

A member of Haifa’s Geography Department since the late 1970s, Hayuth attained the rank of full professor in 1994. He also served as head of the University’s Wydra Shipping and Aviation Research Institute. In 1992, he was appointed Vice-President for Administration; he became Acting President in 1993, and was elected President for the first time in February 1995.

Hayuth is a director of Zim-Israel Navigation Co., Israel’s national carrier. He has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of Transportation, and he chairs a working group of the European Science Foundation dealing with logistics and transportation. Israeli Cabinet ministers have named Hayuth to various committees on matters dealing with maritime policy and strategic planning. This past year he was chosen chairman of the Council of Israeli University Presidents.

The University’s President is married, his wife a specialist in interior design. They have two children, a girl, who has completed her army service and is now studying architecture, and a teenage boy.