Assaf Patir is the Chief Economist at RISE Israel Institute, specializing in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and banking. Before joining SNPI, he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was also an advisor to the Monetary Division at the Bank of Israel and held a visiting scholar position at the Department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Assaf started his career as a physicist, earning a PhD for his research in String Theory from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He later shifted his focus to economics, earning a PhD from Northwestern University for his dissertation on the macroeconomic impact of consumer loan securitization.