Professor Efrat Bron-Harlev, MD

Professor Efrat Bron-Harlev, a mother of four sons, is a pediatrician, pediatric intensive care specialist, and healthcare executive. She earned her medical degree from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University, and is also a graduate of 8400, The Health Network's leadership program.

Since 2020, Professor Bron-Harlev has served as CEO of Schneider Children's Medical Center of Israel. Before that, she held a series of senior leadership positions within Clalit Health Services, Israel's largest healthcare organization, including Director of the Beilinson Campus, Medical Director of Clalit's Northern District, and Deputy Director of Schneider Children's. Her appointment as CEO brought her back to the hospital where she began her career as a resident and later served as a senior physician in pediatric intensive care.

Professor Bron-Harlev has led significant advances in pediatric care in Israel, work that earned her the Ben-Gurion Award in 2022. Throughout her career, she has been guided by the belief that children are not simply small adults and that caring for them requires a fundamentally different approach. That belief is reflected in the hospital's design, in the way families are brought into a child's care, and in the attention given to children's emotional, developmental, and social well-being alongside their medical treatment.

In 2023, Professor Bron-Harlev oversaw the opening of the Glass Building, which doubled Schneider Children's size and significantly expanded its capacity to care for children from across Israel and abroad. She made staff well-being a central design consideration alongside patient care, recognizing that children receive the best care when the people caring for them work in an environment that supports them. The building includes a fortified emergency hospital, expanded inpatient facilities, and Israel's only dedicated pediatric innovation and research center.

In March 2022, she led Schneider Children's participation in a rescue operation that airlifted seriously ill children from Ukraine to Israel, while a hospital delegation operated the pediatric unit of a field hospital near the Ukrainian border. The mission reflected her belief that Schneider Children's has a responsibility to care for children wherever they are.

On the morning of October 7, 2023, Professor Bron-Harlev convened the hospital's leadership within hours of the attack. Critically ill, ventilated children were moved to protected areas first, followed within days by the hospital's neonates into its fortified NICU. As the scale of the abductions became clear, and before the possibility of hostages returning was being discussed publicly, she began preparing a dedicated unit for their eventual return. By the second week of the war, she had assembled a multidisciplinary team that developed a comprehensive medical and psychological framework for the care of children returning from captivity, despite the absence of established medical literature to guide them. By the end of November 2023, Schneider Children's had admitted 19 children, six mothers, and one grandmother into what became the Returning Children's Ward. From the war's second week onward, hospital teams also cared for evacuated children in communities across northern and southern Israel, work that has continued, particularly in the area of mental health.

During the war with Iran, Bron-Harlev led the relocation of the entire hospital into its protected underground emergency complex, where it operated continuously for weeks. Under missile attack and severe staffing pressure, she maintained inpatient, emergency, surgical, outpatient, community, and mental health services for children across the country. Leading a hospital through that period rarely meant choosing between a good option and a bad one. More often, it meant choosing the least harmful option available while protecting children, families, and staff and preserving continuity of care.

In early 2026, Professor Bron-Harlev established SCVC, the world's third venture capital fund dedicated exclusively to innovation in child and adolescent health. The fund was created to address the longstanding gap between the importance of children's health and the investment devoted to pediatric innovation, and it supports technologies, therapeutics, diagnostics, medical devices, and digital solutions developed specifically for children.

Professor Bron-Harlev has been named to Globes' lists of leading figures three times, in 2019 as one of the 50 most influential women in key positions in Israel, in 2022 among its "Beyond Expectations" leaders, and in 2024 again among the 50 most influential women in Israel's economy. She received the Rotary Tolerance Shield in 2017 for her commitment to equitable healthcare for children and a Knighthood from the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in 2024. In 2025, she received the Rappaport Prize for "Women Generating Change." In 2026, she received an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from the Open University of Israel in recognition of her leadership, her contributions to pediatric medicine, and her commitment to innovative, compassionate, and family-centered pediatric care.

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