Ronny Lempel joined Yahoo! Research in October 2007 as the director of Yahoo! Israel Research Ltd., where he oversees R&D activities at the cutting edge of Web search. Prior to joining Yahoo! Research, Ronny spent 4.5 years at IBM's Haifa Research Lab with the Information Retrieval Group, where his duties included research and development in the area of enterprise search systems. Prior to joining IBM, Ronny received his BSc, MSc and PhD from the Faculty of Computer Science at Technion, Israel Institute of Technology in 1997, 1999 and 2003 respectively. Both his MSc and PhD focused on search engine technology. During his PhD studies, Ronny spent two summer internships at the AltaVista search engine.

From 1994 till 1997 Ronny was a part-time employee of IBM's Haifa Research Lab, and worked on various stochastic optimization projects for a group focusing on Operations Research algorithms. Prior to that (1989-1994) he served as an officer in an elite Intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces, where his duties included developing and implementing mathematical algorithms and optimization heuristics.

Ronny has authored numerous papers on search engine technology in leading conferences and journals, and has received several awards from the prestigious WWW conference series. He also serves on the program committees of leading Information Retrieval and Search conferences such as WWW, SIGIR, CIKM and WSDM.