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Dan David (Hebrew: דן דוד; 23 May 1929 – 6 September 2011) was a Romanian-born Israeli businessman and philanthropist.
Dan David was born to a Jewish family in Bucharest, Romania. He joined a Zionist youth movement at the age of 16. After studying economics at university, he worked for Romanian television and became a press photographer. In 1958, his newspaper asked him to travel to West Germany on an assignment. When he requested an exit permit, he was accused of being a Zionist activist and was fired from his job.[1]
He left Romania for Paris in August 1960, later settling in Israel. The following year, he traveled to Europe.
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With a $200,000 loan from a cousin, he won the franchise for Photo-Me International automated photography booths in certain countries. He opened branches in Israel, Spain, Romania and Italy, eventually taking over the company.[3] When David was chairman[4] of Photo-Me in 1999, his and board-member Serge Crasnianski's shares were valued at 210 and 200 million pounds, respectively.[5]
In 2000, David founded the Dan David Foundation with a $100 million endowment. The Foundation awards the Dan David Prize (first awarded in 2002), which is headquartered at Tel Aviv University. For its first 20 years, the prize consisted of three $1 million awards granted in rotating fields of the sciences and the humanities.[6][third-party source needed] In 2021, the Foundation announced[7] it was redesigning the prize to focus on history and other disciplines that study the past, granting up to nine awards of $300,000 to early- and mid-career researchers in those fields.[8]
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The Dan David Center for Human Evolution and Biohistory Research was inaugurated on 25 November 2018, in Dan David's memory.[9] The Center is affiliated with both the Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, where its laboratories and facilities encompass over 1200 meters squared.[10][third-party source needed] The facilities include a micro-CT as well as histological and ancient DNA laboratories.[11][third-party source needed] The Center also houses Israel's national fossil collection,[12][third-party source needed] and a museum exhibit on human biological and cultural evolution.[13]
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