Ben-Dov was born in
Haifa, Israel in 1950. He studied at The
Hebrew Reali School from 1956 to 1968, and was active at the
Israel Boy and Girl Scouts Federation (Tzofim) youth movement. He served the army at a "
Nahal" unit, establishing
kibbutz and
Israeli settlement Mevo Hama at the southern part of the
Golan Heights.
Academic life Ben-Dov did his undergraduate studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Mathematics, Statistics and Economics. He later joined the PhD program at the
Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) department of the
University of California, Berkeley, where he studied from 1973 to 1977, receiving a Ph.D. in
Operations Research in 1977. His thesis,
Optimal Testing Procedures for Coherent Systems, was written under the supervision of Prof.
Richard E. Barlow. Later Ben-Dov taught at
Michigan State University, at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the
Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Professional career In 1986 Ben-Dov started working on
Wall Street at
Prudential Securities as the managing director of the Financial Strategies Group. In 1991 he was the Director of the Rappaport Institute near the
Rambam Hospital and in 1995 he joined
Amdocs as a Senior Vice President in charge of the Haifa branch in Israel. In 1999 Ben-Dov became the CEO of Schema, a Wireless Optimization company which was later acquired by
TEOCO, and in 2008 became the CEO of Time To Know, an
education technology company that provided a holistic service to the
K–12 classroom, which included a
Digital Teaching Platform together with interactive core curriculum. Ben-Dov became the principal and managing director of The
Hebrew Reali School in Haifa at the beginning of 2014. During his tenure he has been involved in a funding dispute with the education ministry. On September 1, 2017, a new building was inaugurated at the Ahuza branch of the Reali School, donated by the Heichal Eliyahu organization. The building has classrooms, an auditorium and a center for
Jewish-
Israeli culture. In October 2018,
makerspaces were inaugurated at the school thanks to a contribution by Dr.
Miriam Adelson, who attended the real school from first to twelfth grade, and her husband
Sheldon Adelson. In the Corona year (2021-2020) the Reali School excelled in managing distance learning by adopting “hybrid learning” conducted in all school classrooms using quality cameras that captured classroom lessons and large TV screens that allowed teachers to follow and share the class with students at home. During that year, the traditional Memorial Day ceremony, which includes all 4,200 students of the school each year, as well as many thousands of graduates, was broadcast live for the first time. In September 2021, two more
kindergartens were opened in the "Realigan" chain, bringing the number of kindergartens in the chain to eight.
Personal life Ben-Dov is married to Prof.
Nitza Ben-Dov, the 2021 recipient of the prestigious
Israel Prize for
Literary Criticism. They have three children: Merav, Michal and Jacob. They live in
Haifa,
Israel. ==Publications==