Velvl Greene
Velvl Greene (; July 5, 1928 – November 21, 2011) was a Canadian–American–Israeli scientist and academic. Specializing in
public health and
bacteriology, he was a professor of public health and
microbiology at the
University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1986, teaching over 30,000 students. He developed the first university-level curriculum in
environmental microbiology in response to an outbreak of
staph infections at American hospitals in the late 1950s. In 1961 he began working for the
NASA Planetary Quarantine Division in an
exobiology program that sought to determine the presence of microbes in outer space. He
immigrated to Israel in 1986, serving as chair of epidemiology and public health and professor emeritus at
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and director of that school's Lord Jacobovitz Center for Jewish Medical Ethics until 2009. Coming from a secular Zionist background, Greene became a
baal teshuva and
Lubavitcher Hasid in the 1960s. He conducted a three-decade-long correspondence with the
Lubavitcher Rebbe discussing the compatibility between
Torah teachings and scientific knowledge.
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