Prof. David Harel has been at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel since 1980, and is incumbent of the William Sussman Professorial Chair in Mathematics. He was Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from 1989 to 1995, and was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science from 1998 to the end of 2004. He is also co-founder of I-Logix, Inc., Andover, MA, and of SenseIT Technologies, Ltd. (DigiScents Israel). Activity in the latter company stopped with the fall of the Nasdaq in April 2001.

He received a B.Sc. from Bar-Ilan University (1974), an M.Sc. from Tel-Aviv University (1976) and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978). He has spent two years at IBM's Yorktown Heights research center, sabbatical years at Carnegie-Mellon and Cornell Universities, and shorter visiting positions at IBM, Lucent Technologies Bell Labs, DEC, NASA, University of Birmingham, Verimag, and the National University of Singapore. From 1991 to 1999 he was an adjunct professor at the Open University of Israel.

In the past he has worked in several areas of theoretical computer science, including computability theory (see, e.g., this paper), logics of programs (see, e.g., this book), database theory (see, e.g., this paper), and automata theory (see, e.g., this paper). Over the years, his activity in these areas diminished, and he has become involved in several other areas, including software and systems engineering, object-oriented analysis and design, visual languages, layout of diagrams, modeling and analysis of biological systems, and the synthesis and communication of smell. He has published widely on these topics (see list of publications), including several books. He is the inventor of the language of statecharts (see the 1984 paper for the original version of the language, or the 1997 paper for the OO version), and co-inventor of live sequence charts (LSCs; see the 1998 paper), and was part of the team that designed the tools Statemate (1984-1987), Rhapsody (1997) and the Play-Engine (2003). His work is central to the behavioral aspects of the UML.

He devotes part of his time to educational and expository work: In 1984 he delivered a lecture series on Israeli radio (see the book version|), and in 1998 he hosted a series of programs on Israeli television. Some of his writing is intended for a general audience (see, for example, Computers Ltd.: What They Really Can't Do ). His awards include the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award (1992), the Israeli Prime Minister's Award for Software (1997), and the Israel Prize in Computer Science (2004). His book, Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing, was the Spring 1988 Main Selection of the Macmillan Library of Science. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE.