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 Dori. Then and now (center) Visualizing education1.jpg "Prof. Yehudit (Judy) Dori then: already a mother")
When Prof. Yehudit (Judy) Dori was growing up in Givatayim, near Tel Aviv, education was all-important. “It’s the one thing no one can take away from you,” her mother, Rysia, a survivor of Auschwitz, and her father, Moshe, who escaped Romania just before the war, told her. “My late mother,” says Dori, “lost everything, including her family. But in Israel she started over again and became a teacher. She inspired me to teach a new generation of students.”
Yehudit met her husband in a summer science camp at the Weizmann Institute. After earning a B.Sc. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, followed by army service, she was already the mother of a young daughter when she applied to the Feinberg Graduate School. She received her master’s degree in the life sciences but was interested in combining science with teaching, and Prof. David Samuel invited her to continue her studies in the Science Teaching Department.
 Dori. Then and now (center) Visualizing education2.jpg "Prof. Yehudit (Judy) Dori now. Full professor")
Dori developed an innovative chemistry curriculum for nursing students, aimed at imparting practical knowledge rather than dry facts copied in a notebook. Her method, which approached chemistry through case studies, became the basis of her textbook, published by the Weizmann Institute. Following postdoctoral research in the U.S., Dori took up a position at the Technion in Haifa, where she recently was appointed a full professor. Her work there has most recently focused on using visualization in science education. She has mentored over 30 master and doctoral students, and has published about 50 articles and book chapters as well as 10 chemistry textbooks.
Dori has four daughters and two granddaughters – proof, she says, that “it’s difficult, but by no means impossible, for a woman to have a family and an academic career.”
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