by stacey palevsky
staff writer
Even as a 12-year-old, Dan Kaganovich preferred biology to baseball.
As a middle-school student in the college town of Bloomington, Ind., he and his professor father arranged for him to work after school in the university’s biology lab.
Fifteen years later, the scientist — who favors shorts and sandals rather than a crisp white lab coat — will study in an Israeli laboratory, thanks to a $20,000 Haas/Koshland Award.
The grant is provided from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund in memory of Bay Area philanthropists Walter Haas and Daniel Koshland. Each year, the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation gives the award to a promising Bay Area college student who shows a strong commitment to Israel.
“I am a scientist, and I am an observant Jew,” Kaganovich said in a phone interview. “Why is that a unique perspective?
“There’s an accepted notion these days that science and religion are meant to be separate, and this is simply not true in Judaism,” he continued. “I don’t see any contradiction whatsoever between an uncompromising scientific world view and a similarly uncompromising belief in the Torah.”
Kaganovich, 27, hopes to complete his doctoral work this summer at Stanford University, where he studies molecular and cellular biology. Specifically, he’s researching how the folding of proteins in cells causes neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
The Haas/Koshland grant pays for one year of study and travel. Kaganovich hopes to go to Israel in the fall, where he will study at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. Already, the award winner is considering making aliyah.
“He’s passionate about Israel,” said Dov Greenberg, rabbi at Stanford’s Chabad. “I think he’ll be a great asset to the Israeli scientific and Jewish communities, since he’s well-versed in both fields.” The two have studied together and celebrated Shabbat for most of Kaganovich’s five years in Palo Alto.
Kaganovich was born in Estonia and moved to the United States at 10. He still has clear memories of living in the former Soviet Union, noting that being an observant Jew in the traditional sense “was simply not an option” since studying Hebrew was forbidden.
After high school, he studied biochemistry at Harvard University, and then began his graduate work at Stanford. He credits his fascination with science to his outdoorsy upbringing and childhood penchant for nature programs.
His main interest outside of science is Judaism, he said. He periodically studies with an Israeli rabbi in Sunnyvale and at Chabad. He often listens to a virtual beit midrash posted online by Yeshivat Har Etzion in Israel.
“It’s really tremendous for someone to be as committed to the pursuit of scientific knowledge as they are to Jewish morality and the land of Israel, the Jewish people and God,” said friend and colleague Jeremy England, 25. “To have that all in one person is really rare and a great asset for Israel and Jews in general.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California