Professor Herve (Hillel) Bercovier earned his D.V.M. degree at Maisons Alfort Veterinary School in 1970. He is a laureate of the Faculty of Medicine Paris-Creteil. He earned a M.Sc. in Ecology and a M.Sc. in Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Paris VI and at the Pasteur Institute. He specialized as a clinical microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute (Bacteriology, Virology, Immunology) where he was recruited and tenured.

He moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Faculty of Medicine in 1980 where he was appointed as a Full Professor in Clinical Microbiology in 1989. His research activity covers many topics including the taxonomy and the pathophysiology of Yersinia (the agent of plague), Legionella, Pasteurella and Mycobacteria (the agent of tuberculosis); the study of new fish pathogens and the development of an efficient vaccine against streptococcal diseases. Since 1990, with Prof. G. Marchal, he has developed the EFD-BCG (a derivative of BCG) and shown that BCG can immuno-regulate various inflammatory pathologies and can prevent (in animal models) diseases such as Asthma, IBD, EAE and atherosclerosis. This has led him to look for an Elderly population exposed to BCG and to study the potential beneficial effect of BCG in that population. With Prof. O. Gofrit (and Prof. C. Greenblatt), he found in two different cohorts that BCG exposure is associated with a low risk of AD. Now with Prof. Tamir Ben-Hur he plans to study the effect of BCG vaccination (intradermic) on blood markers relevant to Alzheimer’s disease in high risk Elderly individuals.