Porat Ruth

Porat was born 1957 to a Jewish family in Sale, Cheshire, England, the daughter of Dr. Dan and Frieda Porat. Her mother was born in Mandatory Palestine, and her father fled Vienna on Kristallnacht and found his way to Mandatory Palestine, enlisted in the British Army as a teenager and later fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. Her father's testimony about surviving the Holocaust was taken by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. She has a brother, Marc Porat, who founded General Magic. Porat moved at a young age to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a research fellow in the physics department at Harvard University. Three years later, her father relocated the family to Palo Alto, California, where he worked at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for 26 years. Porat holds a B.A. in economics and international relations from Stanford University, an M.Sc. in industrial relations from the London School of Economics, and an M.B.A. with distinction from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.