Velvl Greene (July 5, 1928 – November 21, 2011) was a Canadian–American–Israeli scientist and academic. Specializing in public health and bacteriology, he was a professor of public health and microbiology at the University of Minnesota from 1959 to 1986, teaching over 30,000 students. He developed the first university-level curriculum in environmental microbiology in response to an outbreak of staph infections at American hospitals in the late 1950s. In 1961 he began working for the NASA Planetary Quarantine Division in an exobiology program that sought to determine the presence of microbes in outer space. He immigrated to Israel in 1986, serving as chair of epidemiology and public health and professor emeritus at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and director of that school's Lord Jacobo