Yuval Shahar is a professor and previous chair of BGU's Information Systems Engineering department. He holds a B.Sc. and an M.D. degree from the Hebrew University, an M.Sc. in computer science from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford University. After a decade at Stanford as a researcher and full-time faculty member, he has joined BGU to found and head its Medical Informatics Research Center.

Over the past 20+ years, Prof. Shahar's research has focused on temporal reasoning, temporal data mining, therapy planning, decision analysis, information visualization, knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, and knowledge-based systems, mostly in biomedical domains.

Prof. Shahar was a scientific chair of the international Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (AIME) conference (2009) and a many-time scientific program committee member of the American Medical Informatics Association's (AMIA) Fall Symposium. Among multiple awards, Prof. Shahar was granted in 1995 a prestigious NIH 5-year FIRST career award and an NSF award to explore the theoretical and practical implications of the temporal-reasoning methodology he had developed; in 2005 an IBM Faculty Award, and in 2008 an HP Worldwide Innovation Program award. He was elected in 2005 as an International Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI).

Prof Shahar serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Methods of Information in Medicine, and Applied Ontology.