Departments
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Week of 30 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 12 |
Feature
Article
El Al Airlines chairman and British M.P. named new University trustees
At its October 22 meeting, the Boston University Board of Trustees elected two new members: Joseph Ciechanover and Sir Brian Mawhinney.
Joseph Ciechanover is the chairman of El Al Airlines, the national airline of Israel. While a law student at Hebrew University, Ciechanover began working at Israel's Ministry of Agriculture, where he eventually became general counsel under Moshe Dayan, then minister of agriculture. Ciechanover went on to become director general of the Israeli Defense Mission to the United States and Canada, then returned to Israel to become director general of the Ministry of Defense. He later served as director general in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the administrations of Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir. Upon leaving government service, Ciechanover became president of the PEC Israel Economic Corporation and chairman of the Israel Discount Bank of New York. In 1995 he was appointed chairman of El Al.
In 1991 Ciechanover earned a doctorate in religious studies from The University Professors, where he studied under Elie Wiesel. He received an honorary degree from Boston University in 1997.
Sir Brian Mawhinney has served in Britain's House of Commons for 20 years as a member of the Conservative Party. During the administrations of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, Mawhinney held several ministerial appointments, including health, transportation, community relations, and Northern Ireland. Mawhinney was born in Belfast, where he attended Queen's University before receiving a master's degree in radiation biology from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in the same field from the University of London. Before beginning his political career, Mawhinney served on the faculties of the University of Iowa and the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in London. Mawhinney has known BU trustee James M. Howell for two decades and the two have worked together on numerous economic development projects in the United Kingdom.