Velvl Greene  Velvl Greene (July 5, 1928 – November 21, 2011) was a Canadian–American–Israeli scientist and academic. Specializing in public health and bacteriology, he was a professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1986, teaching over 30,000 students. He developed the first university-level curriculum in environmental microbiology in response to an outbreak of staph infections at American hospitals in the late 1950s. In 1961 he began working for the NASA Planetary Quarantine Division in an exobiology program that sought to determine the presence of microbes in outer space. He immigrated to Israel in 1986, serving as chair of epidemiology and public health and professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and director of that school's Lord Jacobovitz Center for Jewish Medical Ethics until 2009. Coming from a secular Zionist background, Greene became a baal teshuva and Lubavitcher Hasid in the 1960s. He conducted a three-decade-long correspondence with the Lubavitcher Rebbe discussing the compatibility between Torah teachings and scientific knowledge. Greene was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on July 5, 1928. His parents were Samuel and Sarah Greene. He had two older sisters. He was given the Yiddish name Velvl after a grandfather, but was officially registered as William. Raised in a secular Zionist home, he attended the I. L. Peretz Folk School, where classes were conducted in Yiddish. As a member of a socialist Zionist youth group in his teens, he legally changed his given name to his Yiddish name, Velvl, to express solidarity with the Jews in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Influenced by his Zionist upbringing at home and at school, he chose to study agriculture in order to prepare for aliyah (immigration) to Israel. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Manitoba on a Canadian army scholarship. He went on to earn a master's degree in dairy bacteriology at the same school. As a condition for receiving his scholarship, he then entered an officer training program, but quit after less than a year to pursue his doctorate in bacteriology at the University of Minnesota. In 1956, shortly after earning his PhD and marrying, Greene accepted a position as an assistant professor of bacteriology at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette, Louisiana. At the same time, he served as rabbi of that community's 60-member Reform congregation, though his only qualification was his ability to read Hebrew.