Ely Porat completed his PhD in 2001, at the age of 21. Thereafter, in parallel to acting as section head of a research group during his extended military service, he was an Assistant Professor at BIU and became an Associate Professor when he was 27 years old. To date, he is the youngest professor in Israel. His primary research field is pattern matching, but he has also worked on streaming algorithms, data structures, coding theory, group testing, compressed sensing and game theory. A big part of his work is interdisciplinary, and he has combined methods from different areas on more than one occasion.