Technion alumna Inbal Kreiss was quoted modestly saying that she is doing something that is “sort of service to the country, something for the sake of Israel.” It is much more than that. Kreiss is Head of Development for Israel’s Arrow 3 missile defense program. She heads the team in the Systems Missiles and Space group of Israel Aerospace Industries that is developing the most advanced missile defense system in the world. The Arrow 3, the third generation of the Arrow anti-ballistic missile defense system, serves as an upper tier in the Israeli multi-tier defense concept intercepting and destroying incoming threats using an advanced exo-atmospheric interceptor.

Kreiss, 44, graduated with honors from the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering in 1988. When asked why she went to Technion, she explains that her aim was to study chemical engineering at the number one institute in the field. She was a visiting researcher in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and before joining Israeli Aerospace Industries/MLM as an Arrow Weapon System Engineer in 2000, she served in the Directorate of Research and Development of the Israeli Ministry of Defense at the rank of major.

Inbal Kreiss, Class of ‘88 Israel cooperates with the USA very closely in the development and testing of the Arrow, setting very clear milestones in development that to date have all been met. In 2010, Kreiss was awarded the Technological Entrepreneurship Award from the International Aerospace Conference, Israel. “The Arrow project employs dozens of engineers and the majority of them are Technion graduates,” she explains. “You could say that the Technion has a major part in Arrow project achievements.”