Daniel Wagner was born in Tel-Aviv, Israel, on December 26, 1953 from Belgian parents. He moved to Belgium in 1955 and grew up in Brussels. In 1975 he obtained a degree in Physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Two years later, in 1977, he got a MSc degree in Materials Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem followed, in 1982, by a PhD in the same discipline. After three years of specialization at the University of Cornell in Ithaca (New York), he began a brilliant academic career at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot in Israel. In 1991, he was offered a permanent position as Associate Professor. Daniel Wagner by then already acquired an international reputation in his field. In 1991 he received the Fiber Society Award for Distinguished Achievement in New Orleans. He is a full professor at the Weizmann Institute since 2000.
Professor Wagner also teaches at the Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, and at various foreign universities. He was a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute in Golm-Potsdam and at the Ecole Centrale in Paris. He also participated in numerous conferences, and presented the Harvard-MIT Joint Nanomaterials Special Lecture in 2013 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Daniel Wagner is an influential and prolific researcher. His professional activities include a range of different themes ranging from classical composite materials and carbon nanotubes to the mechanics of biology-inspired structures etc. To date, he has about 245 articles and chapters published in specialized journals and he has organized many international colloquia.
In 2000 Daniel Wagner was the elected Chairman of the prestigious Gordon Conference on Composites in Ventura, California. Ten years later he won the Gutwirth Research Prize from the Weizmann Institute.
Daniel Wagner is fluent in French, Hebrew, English and Spanish and has a basic knowledge of Dutch and German. He is married, has three children and lives and works in Rehovot but has always remained faithful to the Belgian nationality.