At the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, the future often begins with a deceptively simple question: What can we do today that we could not do before?
“Science and engineering have never been about yesterday’s tasks. They’ve always been about the future,” said Prof. Lihi Zelnik-Manor, vice president of External Relations and Resource Development at the Technion and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Beyond the breakthrough: inside the Technion labs shaping the technologies of tomorrow
After three decades working in computer vision, now one of the foundations of artificial intelligence, Zelnik-Manor sees AI not as an end point but as another stage in a much longer technological evolution.
“For us at the Technion and for our students, it is about: What can you do with AI, and beyond AI?”
That question runs through laboratories across the university, where researchers are working on technologies that range from quantum systems to new approaches in cancer treatment. Some may eventually transform entire industries. Others are still at the stage where scientists are trying to understand what they can make possible at all.
When computing stops looking like computing
One of those frontiers is quantum technology.
In the ultracold atoms laboratory at the Solid State Institute, Prof. Yoav Sagi of the Department of Physics is studying quantum systems and their potential to solve problems that conventional computers cannot.
“To make quantum not just science but technology, you really need to combine the science and the engineering together,” Sagi said.
The distinction matters because a quantum computer is not simply a faster version of the machines people use today. It operates according to fundamentally different principles, opening the possibility of tackling calculations that would overwhelm conventional systems.
Exactly where that potential will lead remains uncertain. That uncertainty, however, is part of the appeal.
For students encountering such systems firsthand, the shift from theory to physical reality can be striking.
“When you learn about it in class, it’s exciting, but when you see it with your own eyes, this is really when you’re like, ‘Wow,’” said Ofri Vizenblit, a PhD student in Chemical Engineering.
Teaching nanoparticles to communicate
At the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering, researchers are exploring a very different frontier: whether nanoparticles can be used not merely to deliver drugs to cancer cells, but to communicate with them.
Dr. Assaf Zinger and his team created empty nanoparticles without chemotherapy and embedded them with membrane proteins from white blood cells.
“Instead of sending chemotherapy, we send a biological message to the cancer cell: Stop dividing,” Zinger explained.
The team is studying solid tumors, including triple-negative breast cancer, in collaboration with physicians at nearby Rambam Health Care Campus. The work brings together scientists, engineers, students and clinicians to study not only cancer cells themselves but the complex environment surrounding them.
For Dr. Devorah Cahn, a postdoctoral fellow researching cancer vaccines and biomimetic nanoparticles, the work is also deeply personal.
“It is very personal to me to work on breast cancer because I’m a BRCA1 mutation carrier,” she said.
That personal dimension extends beyond the laboratory. Zinger recalled meeting the mother of a child with Rett syndrome who asked him a question that cut through all the complexity of research: “Can you help my kid?”
For scientists, that urgency exists alongside a difficult reality. The distance between a promising laboratory result and a treatment that works reliably in people remains enormous.
“We can cure cancer in mice. We’re not doing that very well in humans yet,” Zinger said.
It is precisely that gap, between what science can already demonstrate and what medicine can deliver to patients, that keeps the work moving.
Building the ecosystem before the breakthrough
Across AI, quantum physics and cancer research, the common thread is not a prediction about which technology will change the world first.
Zelnik-Manor argues that the Technion’s role is broader: invest early where emerging technologies intersect with major scientific, national and global challenges, while giving students the scientific foundations, critical thinking and engineering skills needed to pursue ideas whose eventual impact may still be impossible to predict.
“The Technion is not about identifying the breakthrough,” she said. “It’s about creating the talent, the knowledge and the ecosystem around it to change the world.”
That may be the more important challenge in an era when technologies are developing faster than institutions can always define them.
The breakthrough itself may be impossible to forecast. The people, tools and environment needed to make it possible are not.
For the researchers and students working at those frontiers, the task is to keep asking what becomes possible next.
“Our job and responsibility is to spread light,” Zelnik-Manor said.