Dr. Oz Kira

I am the youngest of three siblings, born and raised in Rishon LaZion, Israel. From the age of eight, I played handball (till the age of 32). Around 2003 I started my double bachelor's degree in chemistry and chemical engineering at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). After finishing and working for two years as a process engineer, I went back to the university school to pursue my M.Sc (ending in 2012) and Ph.D. (ending in 2016) at the environmental engineering department, Technion IIT.

After a short postdoctoral period at the Technion IIT, I took my family (wife, six y.o girl, two m.o boy, a dog, and a cat) to Ithaca, NY, for a postdoctoral position at the Sun lab at Cornell University. Three and a half years later, I came to take the position of a faculty member at the Civil and Environmental Engineering at BGU.

My research background started in soil chemistry when I used stable N isotopes to study N soil transformations under the supervision of Prof. Avi Shaviv and Prof. Rafi Linker. My Ph.D., under Prof. Yael Dubowski and Prof. Rafi Linker, dealt with pesticide drift using ground remote sensing. During my postdoc at the Technion, under Prof. Yael Dubowski and Prof. Avi Shaviv, I returned to deal with soil N transformations, concentrating on ammonia and nitrous oxide emissions to the atmosphere. I also dealt with VOC emissions in the sleeping micro-environment.

At Cornell, I started studying solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) remote sensing. I worked on extracting sub-pixel SIF and using SIF for purposes like carbon flux partitioning and yield prediction. In 10/2021 I returned to BGU and started my own lab: the Environmental Sensing Lab.
https://in.bgu.ac.il/Pages/oz-kira.aspx