From 2007 through 2013, Professor Paul D. Feigin served as Senior Executive Vice President of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. In that capacity he strove to promote the Technion’s international standing through membership in organizations like the Global Engineering Deans Council and through forging strategic partnerships like that with Cornell University, which led to winning the bid to build what is now the Joan & Irwin Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City. Prior to that, he had served as Dean of the William Davidson Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management from 1999-2002.
Holder of the Gruenblat Chair in Production Engineering, Prof. Feigin is an authority on statistical design and analysis of experiments including genomic and clinical studies. His research covers three main areas: inference for stochastic processes (such as for time series or discrete event sequences); modern methods of forecasting and data-mining, in which he has created models that have been used to forecast electricity demand; and design and analysis of industrial experiments and clinical trials. His most recent research projects include statistical analysis of genetic association studies and analysis of customer patience in call centers.
Professor Feigin has extensive experience in industry. He has worked for Teva Pharmaceuticals as a statistical consultant, and he served as the scientific director of TechnoSTAT, a data management and biostatistics company that provides services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. Together with Professor Ayala Cohen, he founded and headed the Technion Statistical Laboratory, which to this day provides a broad range of consulting services to academic researchers as well as to government and industry.
In 2013 he was appointed as the Vice President for Strategic Projects, a newly created position in which he was responsible for planning and oversight of Technion’s strategic projects overseas – in particular the Guangdong Technion project, with partners Shantou university and the Li Ka Shing Foundation, and the governments of Guangdong and Shantou. From 2016 he continues to lead the project under the title of Assistant to the President for Strategic Projects.
Prof. Feigin earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Melbourne in 1972 and completed his doctorate at the Australian National University in 1975 — both in statistics. He started his career at the Technion, joining the faculty in 1976. He spent the academic year 1981-1982 as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley and 1987-1988 as a visiting scientist in the Division of Mathematics and Statistics of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Melbourne, Australia. He has also been a visiting professor at Stanford University for several summer sessions, and has held short-term visiting positions at the University of Melbourne, Cornell University, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Monash University in Victoria, Australia.
He has published over 60 scientific papers, is a past president of the Israel Statistical Association, and is an elected fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and of the International Statistical Institute.
He and his wife Naomi have 3 daughters and 9 grandchildren.