Israeli Post-doctoral Fellows

Amichay Afriat was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Reconstructing the spatial properties of Cryptosporidium infection of the small intestine”. For this project Amichay intends to employ various genetic and metabolomic tools to identify key metabolic pathways used by both pathogen and host during a Cryptosporidium infection.

Amichay received his B.Sc. in Biology (Etgar honors’ program) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his M.Sc. in Microbiology from Tel Aviv University.

Under the supervision of Professor Shalev Itzkovitz at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Amichay completed his Ph.D. by creating the first in-vivo single cell atlas of liver stage malaria, allowing him to analyze how the infection evolves over time and in different regions of the liver unique microanatomy. Furthermore, Amichay identified and characterized a previously unknown abortive infection state of the parasite which could potentially unlock avenues for new therapeutics.

His recent publication:

Afriat, A., Zuzarte-Luís, V., Bahar Halpern, K. et al. “A spatiotemporally resolved single-cell atlas of the Plasmodium liver stage”. Nature 611, 563–569 (2022).

Amit was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Heterostructure Optical Imaging: Space-and time-resolved imaging of electronic correlations and topology in moiré materials".

Amit received his B.Sc. in Physics and Biology, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2015. He completed an M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science. His M.Sc. in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics was conducted under the supervision of Professor Ady Stern and Professor Yuval Oreg. His Ph.D. in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics was conducted under Professor Eli Zeldov.

Amit's Ph.D. research focused on nanoscale thermal, magnetic and scanning gate imaging of unconventional dissipation and transport mechanisms in mesoscopic systems, using a scanning SQUID-on-tip. In his postdoctoral studies, he aims to develop a space-and time-resolved optical imaging technique that will map the chemical potential and Maxwell's relations in 2D moiré quantum materials. He will use this imaging technique to elucidate the underlying mechanisms giving rise to the reach and intricate physics of correlated electronic states in moiré quantum materials.

Amit’s recent publications include:

A. Marguerite^†, J. Birkbeck^†, A. Aharon-Steinberg^†, D. Halbertal, K. Bagani, I. Marcus, Y. Myasoedov, A. K. Geim, D. J. Perello, and E. Zeldov, "Imaging Work and Dissipation in the Quantum Hall State in Graphene", Nature 575, 628 (2019).

A. Aharon-Steinberg^†, A. Marguerite^†, D. J. Perello, K. Bagani, T. Holder, Y. Myasoedov, L. S. Levitov, A. K. Geim, and E. Zeldov, "Long-Range Nontopological Edge Currents in Charge-Neutral Graphene", Nature 593, 528 (2021).

A. Aharon-Steinberg^†, T. Völkl^†, A. Kaplan^†, A. K. Pariari, I. Roy, T. Holder, Y. Wolf, A. Y. Meltzer, Y. Myasoedov, M. E. Huber, B. Yan, G. Falkovich, L. S. Levitov, M. Hücker, and E. Zeldov, "Direct Observation of Vortices in an Electron Fluid", Nature 607, 74 (2022).

Rhona Burns was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Tracing the inner roots of Israeli Conservatism.” She received her B.A and M.A in Hebrew Literature from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She then spent some years as an editor, writer and journalist, before continuing to write her PhD dissertation at the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at Bar-Ilan University, as a PhD Presidential fellow. In 2023 she completed her doctorate, which focused on the formation of Jewish nationalism in light of ideas of class and status.  Rhona’s  focus of  research is  centred on investigating the influences of bourgeois civilization on the modern Jewish national idea. This perspective showed the relative dominance of conservative and moderate-liberal outlooks compared to radical, political and social approaches at that time. As a postdoctoral fellow, Rhona intends to expand her investigation on this dominance and its political and intellectual implications for the creation and development of the modern Jewish national movement.

Her recent publications:

"Politics as Invention: On Theodor Herzl's Ideal Elites." AJS Review: The Journal of the Association for Jewish Studies 46, no. 2 (2022): 223-242. doi:10.1353/ajs.2022.0041.

Forthcoming: “On the construction of national symbol in S.Y. Abramovitch’s ‘Susati’” (Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, due to be published 2023)

Elnatan was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Biblical Hebrew Grammar and Biblical Exegesis in the Middle Ages: From Islam to Christianity”.

Elnatan completed his BA, MA (cum laude), and PhD in the Department of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His dissertation, conducted under the supervision of Israel Prize winner Professor Aharon Maman, is titled “Studies in the Linguistic Thought of R. Jonah ibn Janāḥ”. Elnatan is an expert in Biblical Hebrew and in Medieval Hebrew philology and grammar, particularly focusing on the Andalusian works written in Judeo-Arabic.

Throughout his studies, Elnatan earned numerous distinctions and scholarships, including the President’s Stipends – PhD Honors Program (2017–2021), the Warburg Scholarship (2020), the Ephraim Urbach Post-Doctoral Fellowship (2023), and the Kreitman Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Ben-Gurion University (which he declined). Currently, he is teaching in the Department of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University as a Ben-Yehuda Post-Doctoral Fellow.

Elnatan’s recent publications include:

“Risālat al-Taqrīb wa al-Tashīl—R. Yonah ibn Janāḥ’s ‘The Epistle of Bringing Near and Facilitating’,” Sefunot 27 (2022), pp. 121–323

“Rabbi Jonah ibn Janāḥ: an up-to-date Bio-Bibliography,” Alei Sefer 32–33 (2023), pp. 9–74

“The Relationship Between Morphology, Syntax, and Exegesis in R. Jonah Ibn Janāḥ’s Linguistic Thought,” Language Studies 22 (forthcoming)

Noam Cohen was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “A Phenomenology of the Cosmos: Husserl and Heidegger and the rupture between the ancient and the modern conception of the universe.” This project explores the ways in which the philosophical movement of phenomenology confronts pressing philosophical problems by reflecting on ancient Greek accounts of the cosmos. It is part of a broader interest in the possibilities that ancient thought offers for reevaluating issues of contemporary concern. 

Noam completed a BA in philosophy and art history, and an MA in philosophy, both summa cum laude, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He pursued his PhD dissertation in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received the Nathan Rotenstreich Scholarship from the Israeli Council for Higher Education. During this period, Noam was also a guest researcher at the Husserl Archive at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. His work has received recognition through various distinctions, including a fellowship at the Sydney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, an Arthur Fried Memorial fellowship at Shalem College, and the Ted Kisiel Junior Scholar Award presented by the Heidegger Circle of North America.

Noam’s publications include:

“Force and Persuasion: The Musical Two-Tiered Structure of Plato’s Cosmology”. Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy. (forthcoming)

“Mathematical Objectivity and Husserl’s ‘Community of Monads’.” Axiomathes, 32 (Suppl 3): 971-991, 2022.

“The Ethics of the Circular and the Rectilinear in Plato’s Timaeus.” Ancient Philosophy, 40 (1): 93-106, 2020.

Yuval Eytan was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled "A Constructive Critique of the Dialectical Aspect of the Second Wave of Positive Psychology".

Yuval earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Tel Aviv University with professor José Brunner as his supervisor. His main argument is that the transition from the ideal of happiness to the ideal of authenticity represents a deep and broad transformation in Western philosophy. While in the ideal of happiness freedom is conceived as a means of liberation from suffering, within the framework of the concept of authenticity, freedom is achieved as an open process of self-enrichment since the subject is understood in terms of striving not for satisfaction but rather for infinite processes of creative development.

In his postdoctoral studies, Yuval aims to develop, via Kant, Hegel and Marx, a critique of the broad hypothesis in positive psychology according to which loyalty to and uncompromising fulfillment of the inner self will inevitably lead to happiness.

Yuval's recent publications include:

Y. Eytan. "Why Not Happiness? Marx’s Notion of the Free Life", Rethinking Marxism 35, 245-264 (2023).

Y. Eytan. "Rousseau: The Rejection of Happiness as the foundation of Authenticity", Symposion 10, 81-104 (2023).

Y. Eytan. "Hobbes on Scientific Happiness", Philosophical Papers DOI: 10.1080/05568641.2023.2237695 (2023).

Bnaya Gross received his B.Sc. in Computer Science during high school at the Jerusalem College of Technology (JCT). He shifted to physics and received his B.Sc. in physics from Bar-Ilan University (BIU). He continued in the joint M.Sc. and Ph.D. track under the supervision of Professor Shlomo Havlin, an Israel Prize winner, in the Physics Department at BIU. Bnaya’s research focuses on interdependent physical networks, where physical networks such as magnetic networks or superconducting networks interact with each other. After a decade of theoretical research, Bnaya and his colleagues showed, for the first time, how to perform lab experiments on interdependent physical networks to validate theoretical predictions of novel phase transitions and critical phenomena.

During his studies, Bnaya won several distinctions, including the Katz fellowship, and the BIU Rector's award for graduate students.

In the proposed project, Bnaya seeks to apply the interdependent networks paradigm in network medicine to improve our understanding of disease mechanisms by analyzing the interactions between biological networks in the human cell.

Bnaya’s recent publications include:

*Bonamassa, I., *Gross, B., *Laav, M., et al. (2023). Interdependent superconducting networks. Nature Physics, 1-8.‏

Gross, B., et al. (2022). Fractal fluctuations at mixed-order transitions in interdependent networks. Physical Review Letters, 129(26), 268301.‏

Ori Hacohen was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled: "Representation and Intentionality in the Cognitive Sciences". Cognitive researchers often posit the existence of internal brain structures or states which carry content or information. Such states are normally considered "representations". Ori's research project aims to define a unified notion of representation in the cognitive sciences, while exploring how such a notion can relate to our understanding of mental intentionality.

Ori received his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Cognitive Science, as well as his M.A. and Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He continued to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Sidney M. Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science.

During his Ph.D., Ori received the 'President's Stipend for honors doctoral students' from the Hebrew University, the 'Doctoral Scholarship for Excellent Students' from the Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, and the 'Yael Cohen Prize' from the Department of Philosophy. Ori's Ph.D. dissertation, titled "What Are Neural Representations?", received the Allan Bronfman Prize for outstanding doctoral dissertation in the humanities, social sciences or law.

Recent Publications:

Hacohen, O. (2022). What Are Neural Representations? A Cummins Functions Approach. Philosophy of Science, 89(4), 701-720. https://doi.org/10.1017/psa.2022.6

Hacohen, O. (2022). The problem with appealing to history in defining neural representations.  European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 12(3), 45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-022-00473-x

Qais Jaber was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled: “Activity-based profiling of RNA-modifying enzymes in pathogenic bacteria” at Princeton University. In this project, his goal is to apply chemical biology approaches such as the RNABPP workflow with different activity-based nucleoside probes in pathogenic bacteria in order to characterize their complement of RNA-modifying enzymes and identify the role of these enzymes and related modifications in cellular physiology and morphology. This project will provide the first unbiased profiling of RNA-modifying enzymes in pathogenic bacteria and will reveal fundamental insights into their biology and provide opportunities for the development of the next generation of antibacterial agents. His PhD research at Tel Aviv University focused on the development of novel chemical approaches and new molecular tools to be used as probes for the study of the mechanism of action and the prediction of drug resistance of antibacterial and antifungal agents.

His recent publications include:

Jaber, Qais Z.; Logviniuk, Dana; Yona, Adi; Fridman, Micha. "Echinocandins Localized to the Target Harboring Cell Surface Are Not Degraded but those Entering the Vacuole Are". ACS Chemical Biology, 2022, 17, 1155–1163.

Jaber, Qais Z.; Bibi, Maayan; Ksiezopolska, Ewa; Gabaldon, Toni; Berman, Judith; Fridman, Micha. "Elevated Vacuolar Uptake of Fluorescently Labeled Antifungal Drug Caspofungin Predicts Echinocandin Resistance in Pathogenic Yeast". ACS Central Science, 2020, 6, 1698-1712.

Jaber, Qais Z.; Benhamou, Raphael I.; Herzog, Ido M.; Ben Baruch, Bar; Fridman, Micha. "Cationic Amphiphiles Induce Macromolecule Denaturation and Organelle Decomposition in Pathogenic Yeast". Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2018, 57, 16391-16395.

Noy Naaman was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Timing Reproductive Justice”. The research explores how time is operated as a condition under which norms in the context of reproductive rights are negotiated. 

Noy holds degrees in law from Columbia Law School as a Human Rights Scholar (LLM) and from Tel Aviv University (LLB). His PhD research, conducted at the University Of Toronto’s Faculty Of Law, applies a spectrum of queer methodologies to better understand the law as it pertains to human reproduction. During his PhD studies, Noy was awarded a number of scholarships, including the Ontario Trillium Scholarship and Graduate Fellowship in Reproductive Rights, alongside awards, such as the Sarah Weddington Writing Prize for scholarship in reproductive rights and the ICON-S-IL Prize for Outstanding Research.

Among his recent publications:

Noy Naaman, Affective Reproductive Legality, 35 (1) Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (forthcoming, 2023-4).

Noy Naaman, the Paradox of Same-Sex Parentage Equality, 100 (1) Washington University Law Review (2022).

Noy Naaman, Bordering Legal Parenthood, 33 (3) Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities (2022).

Golan Shalvi was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to investigate "The Late Bronze Age in Southern Phoenicia as reflected at Tel Shiqmona and its coastal temple." This study aims to analyze the site's stratigraphy/architecture and material findings, in order to understand LBA processes of change in socio-political, religious, and cultural systems in the region, as well as their apparent collapse and the subsequent generation of other systems in the Iron Age.

Golan Shalvi is a research associate at the Zinman Institute of Archeology and a postdoctoral student at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His postdoctoral research focuses on Tel Shiqmona's purple dye industry, which was the largest and most important in the Iron Age Levant.

Shalvi’s Ph.D. reconstructed Tel Shiqmona's Iron Age occupation and regional and interregional significance (ca. 1100–600 BCE), and he was awarded the Rotenstreich Humanities Ph.D. Scholarship. His MA thesis focused on the Late Bronze Age at Tel Esur on the Sharon Plain on the ancient Via Maris.

Shalvi has participated and supervised various excavations, and conducted large-scale stratigraphic and ceramic typology studies during these excavations and his degrees. He has also examined pottery using petrography and microbeam techniques.

Shalvi’s recent publications include:

Shalvi, G., Gilboa, A. 2022. The long seventh-century BCE at Tel Shiqmona (Israel): a high resolution chronological tool for the Levant and the Mediterranean. LEVANT – The Journal of the Council for British Research in the Levant 54: 190–216. Awarded the Levant Journal Summer Prize for Early Career Best Paper for 2022.

Shalvi, G. and Gilboa, A. 2022. The last four room house in Israel: Stratum 10 at Tel Shiqmona in context. In, Yahalom-Mack, N., Matskevitch, S. and Davidovich, U. (eds), Material, Method, and Meaning: Papers in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology in Honor of Ilan Sharon. Helsinki: Zaphon: 251–312. Awarded the Koschitzky second prize of the Heritage Center for the Study of the Kingdom of Israel at Ariel University.

Shalvi, G., Shoval, S., Bar, S., Gilboa, A. 2020, Pigments on Late Bronze Age painted Canaanite pottery at Tel Esur: New insights into Canaanite–Cypriot technological interaction, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 30.

Shalvi, G., Bar, S., Shoval, S., Gilboa A. 2019, The pottery of Tel Esur, A rural Late Bronze site on the Via Maris. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 382: 111–142.

Shalvi, G., Shoval, S., Bar, S., Gilboa, A. 2019, On the potential of microbeam analyses in study of the ceramics, slip and paint of Late Bronze Age White Slip II ware: An example from the Canaanite site Tel Esur. Applied Clay Science 168: 324–339.

Dr. Nahed Ashqar Sharary is a lecturer in social work in the gender studies program at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a faculty member at the Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev.

In December 2022 Nahed completed her doctorate, "Religious Identities among Muslim Women in Israel in the Context of Family, Society and State" at Ben Gurion University.

In 2020, she was awarded the Dan David Prize for academic excellence and another local award for her research contributions in Israel and around the world.

A recent publication citation:

Ashqar-Shrary, Nahed (2019). The Interpretative Fiqh beyond Palestinian Muslim Women. AlQasmi Journal of Islamic Study. (In Arabic).

Ashqar-Shrary, Nahed & Abu-Rabia-Queder, Sarab (2020). The Colonial-Religious InstitutionalContract: Muslim Women Activists in Israel. Social Politics, 29 (1), 333-354.

Ashqar-Sharary, Nahed. (2022). The Islamic Feminist Ijtihad in Israel. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 38 (2), 33-50. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/867768

Haneen Shibli’s project is titled “Access to care among Muslim Arabs in the United States”.Her research will identify the health needs of Muslim Arabs in the U.S., This study also aims to explain, based on the intersectionality approach, the relationship between social determinants of health and the utilization patterns of healthcare services among different subgroups of Muslim Arabs living in the U.S.

Haneen completed her Ph.D. in the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Her Ph.D. research, under the supervision of Professor Limor Aharonson-Daniel and Dr. Paula Feder-Bubis, focused on the accessibility of healthcare services among the Arab Bedouin community in Israel, particularly among Israel’s most disadvantage group, the Arab Bedouin women. The research centers on social matters and gender issues and uses the sociological model of intersectionality and the framework of social determinates of health.

Haneen has recently been leading research projects regarding COVID-19 among the Arab population in Israel and climate change, community resilience, quality of life related to health and access to digital health among the Arab Bedouin minority in Israel.She is very interested in strengthening the public health among minorities with particular emphasis on health inequalities and policies for narrowing these inequalities.

Additionally, Haneen also holds a position as a research manager at The Azrieli Faculty of Medicine at Bar-Ilan University.

Haneen’s recent publications include:

Shibli, H., Palkin, D., Aharonson-Daniel, L., Davidovitch, N., & Daoud, N. (2022). Inequalities in Trust Levels and Compliance with Physical Distancing During COVID-19 Outbreaks: Comparing the Arab Minority and Jewish Populations in Israel. International Journal of Public Health, 67, 1604533.

Shibli, H., Aharonson-Daniel, L., & Feder-Bubis, P. (2021). Perceptions about the accessibility of healthcare services among ethnic minority women: a qualitative study among Arab Bedouins in Israel. International Journal for Equity in Health, 20(1), 1-9.

Shibli, H., Teschner, N. & Shapira, S. (2022). Energy poverty under the conditions of climate change and its consequences on community resilience. Kriot Israeliot [Israeli readings], 2, 122-157. (In Hebrew*)

Shapira, S., Shibli, H., & Teschner, N. (2021). Energy insecurity and community resilience: The experiences of Bedouins in Southern Israel. Environmental Science & Policy, 124, 135-143.

Reut Zabag was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research titled “Deficits in flexibility as a risk factor for the interplay between social anxiety and depression” at Yale University. Reut is interested in understanding the role of cognitive flexibility in the temporal unfolding of emotional distress and specifically in the interplay between social anxiety and depression.

Reut received her BA in Psychology and Economics (Magna cum laude) from Bar-Ilan University. She received her MA in Child Clinical Psychology (Summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In her PhD studies, Reut examined the relationship between social anxiety and cognitive flexibility under the supervision of Professor Eva Gilboa-Schechtman and Professor Einat Levy-Gigi. While studying at Bar-Ilan University, she received the Rector prize for excellence and the Presidential scholarship award.

Her recent publications include:

Zabag, R., Gilboa-Schechtman, E., & Levy-Gigi, E. (2022). Reacting to changing environment: Updating patterns in social anxiety. Behaviour Research and Therapy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2022.104159

Zabag, R., Azoulay, R., Rinck, M., Becker, E., Levy-Gigi, E., & Gilboa-Schechtman, E. (2023). You never get a chance to undo a negative first impression: Social anxiety is associated with impaired positive updating of social information. Personality and Individual Differences. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111993

Hadas Zur was awarded the Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research on “Violent events in the Digital City: Practices, Values, Transformations”.  The project examines violent encounters between opposing political groups in three cities worldwide and explores the interrelations between the digital and the spatial in the acceleration of violence.

Hadas holds an MA in sociology and anthropology from Tel Aviv University. She completed her Ph.D. research in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University. Her Ph.D. research focused on urban violence in the digital age. During her PhD Hadas was a fellow in the Laboratory of Contemporary Urban Design at Tel Aviv University where she coordinated a large research on smart cities and participated in a research on poverty and urban regeneration. She served as the editor of the Journal and Podcast Urbanologia (2016-2023).

Hadas’s recent publications include:

Zur, H., & Hatuka T. (2023) Local-Digital Activism: Conceptualizing the Relationships Between Place, social media and Violence in Changing Urban Politics, Social Media + Society

Zur, H. (2022). Policing temporality: Police reflection on the role of police in gentrifying a high-crime neighborhood, Urban Affairs Review, online first, https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087422109674

Zur, H. (2021). The formation of invisible prostitution in Tel Aviv: Police, law and the ordering of space, Law, Society and Culture, (D), 133-164. [in Hebrew]

Eihab Abu-Rabiah was awarded the Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research on the “Lexical competence among young Hebrew L1 and L2 learners: Similarities and differences”. In this research, Eihab will examine vocabulary development among young, Arab learners of Hebrew as a second language, using lexical measures and compare their vocabulary development to first-language Hebrew speakers.

Eihab completed his Ph.D. research in the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). His Ph.D. research, under the supervision of Prof. Roni Henkin-Roitfarb and Doctor Roey J. Gafter, focused on the breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge of Hebrew as L2 among Arabic-speaking students. The study intended to adapt lexical measures to better suit the orthographic properties of the Hebrew language. The research has several implications for second language acquisition and language assessment. Eihab has also held a position as a fellow at the BGU Literary Lab.

Eihab’s recent publications include:

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2020) a. Lexical measures for testing progress in Hebrew as Arab students’ L2. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(3), 1096-1114. https://doi.org/10.17263/jlls.803551 (won the MAHAR award for an outstanding article by a research student in Humanities - BGU)

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2020) b. The level of abstractness, lexical diversity and lexical density as measures of progress in the acquisition of Hebrew as a second language for Arabic speakers. oryanut ve-safa [Literacy and Language], 8, 71-93. [In Hebrew*] pdf

Abu-Rabiah, E. (2020) c. Lexical diversity: Theory, practice and in-between issues. Lexi-Kaye, 13, 3-5. [In Hebrew*] https://doi.org/10.54301/xevu1230

Roni Cohen was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “In Search of the Early Modern Earworm: An Examination of Incidentally Copied Literary Pieces in the Margins of 15th-16th Century Jewish Manuscripts”. The project explores a previously undiscussed written corpus that is nevertheless oral in nature: short literary pieces—ranging from liturgical poems to fables, riddles, and even dirty rhyming jokes—that appear in early modern Jewish manuscripts. The project aims to shed a light on a repertoire of popular pieces that were preserved by scribes almost by mistake, texts that were written matter-of-factly – almost thoughtlessly - to test the ink, to practice form, or just for the pleasure of forming the words.

Roni is a post-doctoral fellow in the ERC research project Jewish Translations and Cultural Transfer in Early Modern Europe, at Ben-Gurion University. His Ph.D. dissertation, written in the Department of Jewish History at Tel-Aviv University, was titled “Carnival and Canon: Medieval Parodies for Purim”. Roni’s research deals with European Jewish popular culture in the late Middle Ages and the early modern, and the relationships between textual pieces and communities.  

Roni's recent publications include:

“’Between Blessed Mordecai and Cursed Haman’: The Story of Esther in Kalonymos ben Kalonymos’ ‘Massekhet Purim’ and the Medieval Custom of Hitting Haman”, Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore 37(2021), p. 43–69 (Hebrew).

“From Ridicule to Ritual: Standardization and Canonization Processes in the Transmission of Purim Parodic Literature”, Medioevi, 7 (2021), p. 225–249.

‘A Present for Purim’: An Unknown Yiddish Poem on the Megillah, introduction and commentaries: Roni Cohen, Tel Aviv: H. Leyvik Farlag, 2021 (Yiddish).

“‘They say I am becoming greater than my peers’: An apprentice-scribe in early 18th century Amsterdam”, Studia Rosenthaliana: Journal of the History, Culture and Heritage of the Jews in the Netherlands, Vol. 46 (2020), p. 137–154.

"Parodies for Purim in the Early Modern Period and the Excommunication which was not.” Forthcoming in Zion (Hebrew) (forthcoming).

Hagai Diamandi received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering summa cum laude in the Faculty of Engineering at Bar-Ilan University (BIU). He continued to M.Sc. and Ph.D. research under the supervision of Prof. Avi Zadok in the Faculty of Engineering at BIU. Hagai's research focuses on interactions between light and acoustic waves in optical fibers. Hagai and his colleagues analyzed, demonstrated, and employed the effects towards many applications, including distributed sensing, radio-frequency oscillators, and lasers.

During his studies, Hagai won several distinctions, including the Azrieli fellowship, and the BIU Rector's award for graduate students.

Hagai is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Yonina Eldar’s group at the Weizmann Institute. He is supported by the Israeli Academy’s emergency postdoctoral fellowship. His work focuses on intelligent data acquisition and signal processing of data from optical systems.

In the proposed project, Hagai seeks to address the intensified opto-mechanical interactions in silicon-photonic devices, where light and sound waves are tightly confined. Hagai also won the Rothschild fellowship.

Hagai’s recent publications include:

Diamandi, H. H., et al. (2022). Interpolarization Forward Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Standard Single‐Mode Fibers. Laser & Photonics Reviews

Bashan, G.*, Diamandi, H. H.*, London, Y*, et al. (2018). Optomechanical time-domain reflectometry. Nature communications 9(1).‏

Omri Elmaleh was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Home on Both Sides of the Border: Muslim Diasporas across South American frontiers, 1950–2010.” His research examines the additional and particular challenges Muslim immigrants have faced in international trans-border cities across the shared borders of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay in recent decades. It focuses on cross-border mobility between cities, and the challenges that such movement presents to the process of identity formation – at the transnational, national, and individual levels.

Omri received his BA in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Romance and Latin American Studies, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He then completed his MA and PhD studies (currently enrolled) at Tel Aviv University. He is an awardee of the Rotenstreich Scholarship for outstanding Ph.D. students in the humanities and the Raoul Wallenberg Prize for Human Rights and Holocaust Studies.

Omri’s recent publications include:

Elmaleh, O., “Together yet Apart: The Institutional Rift among Lebanese-Muslims in a South American Triple Frontier and its Origins,” Anuario de Historia de América Latina, (Hamburg University, Germany) vol. 56 (2019): 97-121.

Elmaleh, O., "The Hybrid Identity of Lebanese in the Triple Frontier between Argentina-Brazil-Paraguay," Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly [in Hebrew], vol. 144 (2021): 90-103.

Elmaleh, O., “Muslims in Brazil", in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

Gai Farchi was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Material Textualities: Collecting, Hoarding and Discarding in Literature and Beyond". Gai's project stresses the importance of the literary medium in addressing the urgent ecological demand for attentiveness to the non-human. In essence, it explores the interdependency of human and non-human entities through literary-material desires (collecting, hoarding, and discarding) against representational readings of literature. Based on recent developments in literary theory, this project asks how we can read literature under the distinct material configurations of collecting and hoarding, and how eco- material concepts like waste, reusing, and recycling can be applied to literary analysis.

Gai completed his PhD studies at the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. He was awarded with the Chateaubriand scholarship and was a visiting researcher at Paris Diderot University.

His recent publications include:

(Forthcoming,) “Literature between Collecting and Hoarding: Revisiting the Object in Bon, Flem, and Perec”, French Studies, Oxford University Press.

2022 “On Plastic”, Theory & Criticism, Van Leer Institute, Jerusalem. Essay, in Hebrew.

2021 “A Matter of Life and Death: Michel Houellebecq’s Vibrant Materialism”, French Forum. Vol. 46. No. 3. University of Pennsylvania Press.

2020 “Literature Underwater: The Oceanic Becomings of Nothomb and Darrieussecq”. French Forum. Vol. 45. No. 2. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Yuval Givon was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “The Jesuit Overland Pursuit: Environmental History of a Pious Enterprise in the Seventeenth Century” at Harvard University. The project investigates the Society of Jesus’ century-long engagement with the idea of establishing an overland corridor to China as an alternative to the troublesome sea voyage. It embraces a global perspective and addresses the overland initiative as a continuous, self-conscious institutional undertaking by a globally minded religious organization, designed to facilitate long-distance communication and tie together Jesuit networks already at work in the increasingly connected world of the seventeenth century.

Yuval is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSoC) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and an alumnus of the Azrieli Foundation doctoral fellows’ program. His Ph.D. dissertation in History at Tel Aviv University focused on the reconstruction of Jesuit communication networks and news channels between China and Europe during the dynastic transition from Ming to Qing in the mid-seventeenth century. He holds a B.A. in History from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and an M.A. in History from Tel Aviv University.

Yuval’s recent publications include:

Givon, Y. (Forthcoming, December 2022). “Connecting Eurasia: Jesuit Experimentation with Overland Mobility between China and Europe, 1656–1664,” Journal of World History 33, no. 4.

Givon, Y. (2019). “A Tale of Dynastic Change in China: The Ming-Qing Transition through Athanasius Kircher SJ’s China illustrata (1667),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 88, no. 1: 49–101.

Givon, Y. (2016). “Sinophile among Sinophobes? John Bell (1691–1780) and the Image of China in the Travel Literature of Mid-Eighteenth Century Britain,” Historia 36 (2016): 89–112. [Hebrew]

Gil Goffer was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research in geometric group theory. Her research will focus on possible interactions between geometric group theory and related theories, including probability, analysis, and topology.

Her PhD research, conducted at the Department of Mathematics, Weizmann Institute of Science, dealt with totally disconnected locally compact groups and with invariable generation of infinite groups. During her PhD studies Gil was supported by Arriane de Rothschild women’s doctoral program and was awarded the Sephora Berrebi Award for women in advanced mathematics.

Gil's recent publications include:

Goffer, G., & Lederle, W. (2021). Conjugacy and dynamics in almost automorphism groups of trees. International Journal of Algebra and Computation, 1-49.

Goffer, G., & Lazarovich, N. (2020). Invariable generation does not pass to finite index subgroups. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.05523. to appear in Journal of Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics.

Goffer, G., & Noskov, G. A. (2020). A few remarks on invariable generation in infinite groups. Journal of Topology and Analysis, 1-22.

Nimrod Harpak was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Development of Novel Materials towards High Energy Density Lithium-Ion Batteries” at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). In this project, novel electrodes and electrolytes will be investigated and developed to achieve higher energy density in comparison to current lithium-ion battery technology.

Nimrod received both his BSc in chemistry and biology and PhD in chemistry from Tel Aviv University.

His PhD research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Fernando Patolsky and focused on transforming electrochemically inactive stainless-steel substrates into nanowire-structured, electrochemically active substrates for use in lithium-ion batteries and sensing applications, using self-catalyzing methodologies.

Recent publications:

Harpak, N., Davidi, G., Schneier, D., Menkin, S., Mados, E., Golodnitsky, D., Peled, E. and Patolsky, F. “Large-Scale Self-Catalyzed Spongelike Silicon Nano-Network-Based 3D Anodes for High-Capacity Lithium-Ion Batteries” Nano Letters, 2019, 19, 3, 1944-1954.

Harpak, N., Davidi, G., Cohen, A., Raz, A. and Patolsky, F. “Thermally-treated nanowire-structured stainless-steel as an attractive cathode material for lithium-ion batteries” Nano Energy, 2020, 76, 105054.

Harpak, N., Davidi, G. and Patolsky, F. “Breathing parylene-based nanothin artificial SEI for highly-stable long life three-dimensional silicon lithium-ion batteries” Chemical Engineering Journal, 2022, 429, 132077.

Faris Horani was awarded a Fulbright-ISEF Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Colloidal synthesis of two-dimensional materials and study of their optical and magnetic properties”. This research aims to explore new bottom-up chemical approaches for obtaining two-dimensional atomically thin materials with variable electronic (superconductors, semiconductors, insulators) and magnetic (ferromagnets, antiferromagnets) properties. This would impact the development of new and emerging spintronic and optoelectronic devices.

Faris started his academic career at the Technion Institute of Technology, where he finished two bachelor’s degrees in Chemistry Science and Biochemical Engineering. In his final year, he received first prize in the international iGEM competition for developing a groundbreaking biosensor that can detect toxins and allergens in low concentrations. His PhD research focused on the synthesis of semiconductor nanocrystals, which have a technological interest due to their tunable electronic properties by variation of size, shape, and composition. During his doctoral studies, Faris received several awards, including the Neubauer scholarship and Szego award for excellence in teaching.

Faris’s recent publications include:

Horani, F.; Meir, I.; Lifshitz, E. Room Temperature Colloidal Coating of II-VI Nanoplatelets with Quantum Dots. J. Phys. Chem. C 2021, 125, 25729−25738.

Horani, F.; Lifshitz, E. Unraveling the Growth Mechanism Forming Stable γ-In2S3 and β-In2S3 Colloidal Nanoplatelets. Chem. Mater. 2019, 31, 5, 1784-1793.

Horani, F.; Lifshitz, E. Deciphering the Structural Evolution and Growth Mechanism of 3D β-In2S3 Nanostructures.  J. Phys. Chem. C 2019, 123, 50, 30723-30731.

Ori Katz was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “How Judges’ Attitudes toward Contractual Conflicts Affect Decision-Making”. The research will employ experimental methods to examine how attitudes toward three key conflicts of contract law - Individualism, Formalism, and Egalitarianism - shape judicial decisions, consciously and unconsciously.

Ori has an LL.B. degree in Law and Psychology (Summa cum laude), and a PhD in Law, both from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In his PhD research, Ori identified the three above-mentioned key conflicts of contract law, analyzed them theoretically, developed a self-report scale for measuring attitudes toward them, and studied these attitudes across various populations.

Ori was awarded the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities’ Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the Kaye Einstein Scholarship, the Cheshin Fellowship for PhD students, and the Joanna Friedlander Prize.

Ori`s recent publications include:

Katz, O., & Zamir, E. (forthcoming 2022). “Substituting invalid contract terms: theory and preliminary empirical findings”. Law & Social Inquiry.

Katz, O. (2021). “Mapping the diversity of thought – an attitude theory of contract law”. Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 31(1), 49-115.

Katz, O., & Zamir, E. (2021). “Do People Like Mandatory Rules? The Choice between Disclosures, Defaults, and Mandatory Rules in Supplier-Customer Relationships”. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 18(2), 421-460.

Roy Marom was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Early encounters in Palestine's Jewish Colonies – the Moshavot, 1878-1914.” The project sets out to reassess this formative period in the development of Jewish-Arab relations in Israel/Palestine by examining the spatial complexities of the intertwined Jewish and Palestinian communities from new, transnational and local, socio-cultural perspectives.

Roy completed his PhD in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Haifa, 2022. His dissertation addressed the changes in the patterns of Arab settlement in Samaria and the Plain of Sharon between the years 1700-1948.

During his doctoral studies, Roy was an Azrieli Graduate Fellow (2018-2021) and won the Rottenstreich scholarship for outstanding PhD students, among other distinctions.

He earned his M.A. (summa cum laude) in the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies (2017), and his B.A. (summa cum laude) in the Departments of Arabic and Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University (2010).

Roy’s current research concerns the social history of rural Palestine during the Late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, as well as the history and archaeology of key Late-Islamic sites in Israel.

Among his recent publications:

Roy Marom. (2021). The Abu Hameds of Mulabbis: An Oral History of a Palestinian Village Depopulated in the Late Ottoman Period. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2021.1934817

Roy Marom. (2020). RAF Ein-Shemer: Forgotten Case of Jewish and Arab Work in a British Army Camp in Palestine during the Second World War. War & Society 39.3 (Special Issue: Marginalised Histories of the Second World War), 189-209. https://doi.org/10.1080/07292473.2020.1786889 

Roy Marom (2019). A Short History of Mulabbis (Petah Tikva, Israel). Palestine Exploration Quarterly 151.2, 134-145. https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2019.1621734

Maha Natoor was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled: “Religious minorities' beliefs, traditions and well-being in the context of modernity: The case of the Druze in the United States and Israel”. The study will seek to develop a multidimensional understanding of the Druze religious minority in the United States and Israel. It will focus on the intrapsychic aspects of the belief in reincarnation and its influence on self-perception in different cultures.

Maha is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Haifa, and her current focus is on the links between material culture and the Druze Notq phenomenon. Notq is the remembrance and talking about the previous incarnation. Maha's PhD dissertation focused on the therapeutic and narrative components of the belief in reincarnation and the Notq phenomenon among the Druze in Israel.

During her PhD studies, she received an award from the Druze Heritage Center in Israel and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Haifa (2021); the Brus-Wzain Scholarship, University of Haifa (2020) and the Graduate Studies Authority scholarship, University of Haifa for excellent students (2016-2019).

Maha’s recent publications include:

Natoor, M., Shoshana, A. (2021). The Phenomenology of ‘Solved’ Reincarnation Stories Among Druze in Israel: Private Self, Symbolic Type and Daily Life. Cult Med Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-021-09711-y

Natoor, M., & Shoshana, A. (2020). Notq Arrives at the Clinic: How Druze Therapists Deal with the Cultural Phenomenon of Remembering and Talking about Previous Incarnation Among the Druze in Israel. Ethos, 48(2), 171-191.

Shlomit Sharoni was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project entitled “Elucidating the sensitivity of ocean deoxygenation to the macromolecular composition of marine primary producers.”

In her Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute of Science, she studied how variations in the elemental composition of microscopic algae affected ocean chemistry, climate, and evolution.

In her postdoctoral research at MIT, she will further explore how variations in the macromolecular composition of the marine primary producers affect the loss of oxygen in the ocean.

Shlomit's recent publication include:

Sharoni S. and Halevy I., (2021) Geologic controls on phytoplankton elemental composition and evolution. PNAS, 119(1)e2113263118

Sharoni S. and Halevy I., (2020) Nutrient ratios in marine particulate organic matter are predicted by the population structure of well-adapted phytoplankton. Science Advances, (6) eaaw9371.

Nir was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Chiral induced Magnetic Impurities by Scanning Tunneling Microscopy".

Nir received his B.Sc. in Physics and Chemistry, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2015. His M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Applied Physics were conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under Prof. Yossi Paltiel.

Nir's Ph.D. research focused on local and controlled magnetic impurities induced by chiral molecules. In his postdoctoral studies, he aims to further elucidate the magnetic interaction between chiral molecules and metallic surfaces by scanning tunneling microscopy, to advance novel logic devices by creating local and controlled magnetization in metals by chemically adsorbing chiral molecules.

Nir’s recent publications include:

N. Sukenik, F. Tassinari, S. Yochelis, O. Millo, L. T. Baczewski, Y. Paltiel (2020): Correlation between Ferromagnetic Layer Easy Axis and the Tilt Angle of Self Assembled Chiral Molecules in: Molecules, 25(24), 6036.

I. Meirzada†, N. Sukenik†, G. Haim†, S. Yochelis, L. T. Baczewski, Y. Paltiel, N. Bar-Gill (2021): Long-Time-Scale Magnetization Ordering Induced by an Adsorbed Chiral Monolayer on Ferromagnets in: ACS Nano, 15, 3, 5574–5579.

N. Sukenik, H. Alpern, E. Katzir, S. Yochelis, O. Millo, Y. Paltiel (2018): Proximity Effect Through Chiral Molecules in Nb-Graphene Based Devices in: Adv. Mater. Technol. 3, 1700300.

Eliad Tsfadia was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Constructions and Limitations of Differentially Private Computations” in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. In his Ph.D. and M.Sc., Eliad contributed to a number of topics in Cryptography and Differential Privacy, and to one core topic in the interconnection between them. Eliad received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science, and his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Tel Aviv University.

During his Ph.D. studies, Eliad worked for two years as a Security Researcher at IBM Research - Haifa, and three years as an intern researcher at Google Research - Israel.

Eliad’s recent publications include:

I. Haitner, N. Mazor, J. Silbak, and E. Tsfadia, “On the Complexity of Two-Party Differential Privacy”. Accepted to the Proceedings of the 54th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), 2022.                           

E. Tsfadia, E. Cohen, H. Kaplan, Y. Mansour, and U. Stemmer, “FriendlyCore: Practical Differentially Private Aggregation,” CoRR, vol. abs/2110.10132, 2021 (under review).

I. Haitner, N. Makriyannis, S. Ranellucci, and E. Tsfadia, “Highly Efficient OT-Based Multiplication Protocols”. Accepted to the Proceedings of the 41st Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptology and Information Security (Eurocrypt), 2022.

Hadas Zahavi is a Ph.D. student within the framework of a direct double Ph.D. program (Cotutelle) at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University and the Tel Aviv University. Her postdoctoral research seeks to define a new model of testimony, written by contemporary authors who were not physically present in the conflicts their writings describe in first-person narrative and the present tense. This literary corpus constitutes a watershed in the history of modern testimonial literature, which ascribes absolute authority as war witnesses to ‘the men who were there’, in the conflict zone, during the war. Understanding the intergenerational consequences of war and the participation of Western governments in conflicts around the world provides contemporary writers a new authority to witness wars in which they were not present. During the last four years, she explored the research question ‘How can we bear witness to a war in which we were not present?’ through French literature written by the second generation of world wars. In her postdoc, she will examine the potential of this model of testimony for reconciliation and coexistence between authors on different sides of a conflict through an innovative corpus written by the second generation of the Algerian war.

Hadas Zahavi, The Michelin Guides to the Battlefields of the First World War: The Destruction of War as a Tourist Attraction, Oxford French Studies, 2022;, knab221, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/knab221

Fareeda Abo-Rass was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Barriers and facilitators to mental health service use among Hispanic and African American minorities in the U.S.". This research will explore a comprehensive set of sociocultural barriers and facilitators to mental health service use among Hispanics and African Americans in the U.S., and examine two models, integrating these factors as correlates of mental health services use for each minority. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Conflict Management & Resolution Program in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

In her PhD research, Fareeda examined health-related quality of life, illness representations, self-stigma and self-esteem among younger and older Israeli Arabs diagnosed with depression. During her PhD studies, she was awarded the Council for Higher Education – Planning & Budgeting Committee Scholarship for outstanding PhD students in Israel, and the Jewish-Arab Center in University of Haifa Scholarship for outstanding female Arab students.

Fareeda’s recent publications include:

Abo-Rass, F., Shinan-Altman, S., & Werner, P. (2020). “Health-related quality of life among Israeli Arabs diagnosed with depression: The role of illness representations, self-stigma, self-esteem, and age”. Journal of Affective Disorders, 274, 282-288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2020.05.125

Abo-Rass, F., Werner, P., & Shinan-Altman, S. (2020). “Self-stigma formation process among younger and older Israeli Arabs diagnosed with depression”. Aging and Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2020.1758901

Abo-Rass, F., Shinan-Altman, S., & Werner, P. (2020). “Depression illness representations among Arabs in Israel: A qualitative study comparing younger and older adults”.  Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, 35(4), 353-366. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-020-09413-9

Abo-Rass, F., Werner, P., & Shinan-Altman, S. (2021). “Cognitive illness representations among Israeli Arabs diagnosed with depression and their relationship with health-related quality of life”. International Journal of Social Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020764021992406

Gil Baram was awarded the Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research on “Attribution 4.0: A New Approach to Strategic State Response to Cyber Attacks”. In this research Gil will focus on national decision making during cyber conflicts and the reasons state actors are likely to decide various attribution strategies against states and non-states adversaries.

She completed her Ph.D. research at the School of Political Science, Government and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. Gil has held fellow positions with the Centre of Excellence for National Security at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center at Tel Aviv University.

Her Ph.D. research examined under what circumstances governments choose public acknowledgment of cyberattacks over secrecy, by developing a pioneering analytical model that allows decision makers to predict their adversary’s strategy, supported by an original coded database of cyberattacks.

Gil’s recent publications include:

Baram, G., & Ben-Israel, I. (2019). “The academic reserve: Israel's fast track to high-tech success”. Israel Studies Review, 34(2), 75-91.

Baram, G., & Sommer, U. (2019, May). “Covert or not covert: national strategies during cyber conflict”. In 2019 11th International Conference on Cyber Conflict (CyCon), pp. 1-16. IEEE.

Baram, G., & Menashri, H. (2019). “Why can't we be friends? Challenges to international cyberwarfare cooperation efforts and the way ahead”. Comparative Strategy, 38(2), 89-97.

Ziv was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Behavioral, Neural and Molecular Mechanisms of PTSD" at Yale University.

Ziv received his B.Sc. in Neuroscience (Biology & Psychology), Summa Cum Laude, from the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University in 2015. His Ph.D. in Neuroscience was conducted at the Sagol Brain Institute at Tel Aviv University.

Ziv's Ph.D. research focused on uncovering neural and cognitive moderators of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptom trajectories. In his postdoctoral studies, he aims to further elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying anxiety- and stress-related disorders, in order to advance novel mechanisms-based treatments and improved clinical outcomes for individuals suffering from these debilitating disorders.

Ziv’s recent publications include:

Ben-Zion, Z., Zeevi, Y.,Benjamini, Y., & Hendler, T. (2020). “Multi-Domain Potential Biomarkers for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Severity in Recent Trauma Survivors”. Translational Psychiatry, 10 (1), 1-11.

Ben-Zion, Z., Artzi, M., & Hendler, T. (2019). “Neuroanatomical Risk Factors for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in Recent Trauma Survivors”. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging 5 (3), 311-319.

Ben-Zion, Z., Fine, N. B., Hendler, T., & Shalev, A. Y. (2019). “Neurobehavioral Moderators of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Trajectories: Study Protocol of a Prospective MRI Study of Recent Trauma Survivors”. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 10(1), 1683941.

Asaf Gayer was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled: ”Integrating the Qumran Papyri into Papyrological Research: The Case of 4QpapRitual Marriage (4Q502)”. Asaf’s project will examine the literary papyrus manuscripts from Qumran in light of Mediterranean scribal culture, comparing the Qumranic materials with Egyptian papyri from Oxyrhynchus. Asaf’s research focuses on the study of ancient Jewish manuscripts, mainly from the region of the Dead Sea. His work is characterized by the use of digital tools and techniques along with traditional philological work, illuminating the material aspects and the literary structure of a composition, unveiling its motifs and traditions and its interrelations with surrounding literary cultures.

Asaf is currently a postdoc fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, working on the Isaiah scrolls from Qumran cave 4. Asaf’s dissertation explores the literary motif of measuring and weighing in Qumranic wisdom tradition and in other second Temple Jewish literature.

Asaf’s recent publications include:

Gayer, A (2021). “New Readings and Joins in the Wisdom Composition Instruction,” Meghillot 15, 21-44. [Hebrew].

Gayer, A (2020), “A New Reconstruction of the ‘Wisdom of the Hands’ Unit in 4QInstruction^d (4Q418),” JSP 30.2 60-73.

Ben-Dov J, Stökl Ben Ezra D & Gayer A (2017). “Reconstruction of a Single Copy of the Qumran Cryptic-script Serekh haEdah,” RQ 29.1 [109], 21–77.

Yael Gazit was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Philosophical Progress and Appropriation.” His research aims to suggest a novel account of philosophical progress in which philosophical appropriation plays a central role. It purports to do so by grafting a close analysis of Robert Brandom's appropriation of Hegel, onto a detailed reconstruction of Wilfrid Sellars's approach to the history of philosophy, that will result in one tradition, on which both philosophical views are provided, and an exemplification of historical development by appropriation.

In her PhD research, Yael had begun laying out a philosophy of appropriation, focusing on its value as an insightful tool of philosophical understanding. She was awarded a Rotenstreich Scholarship for outstanding PhD students in the Humanities and the Dan David Prize Scholarship for outstanding doctoral and post-doctoral researches.

Yael’s recent publications include:

Gazit, Y. (2020). “Talking with Tradition: On Brandom’s Historical Rationality.” Open Philosophy 3 446-61.

Gazit, Y. (2019 ). “Appropriation, Dialogue, and Dispute: Towards a Theory of Philosophical

Engagement with the Past.” Journal of the Philosophy of History 13:3, 403-22.

Shay Golan was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Stringology in Modern Models of Computation”. This research will focus on algorithms for string problems in models like the streaming model and the distributed model. Such problems arise when processing massive amounts of information that cannot be stored or handled by a single computer.

Shay has a BA from the Open University of Israel and an MA from Bar-Ilan University, both in Computer Science. His PhD research at Bar-Ilan University focuses on algorithms for string problems in the streaming model of computation. During his PhD he developed novel tools for solving streaming pattern matching problems.

Shay’s recent publications include:

Chan, T. M., Golan, S., Kociumaka, T., Kopelowitz, T., & Porat, E. (2020). “Approximating text-to-pattern Hamming distances”. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing (pp. 643-656).

Birenzwige, O., Golan, S., & Porat, E. (2020). “Locally consistent parsing for text indexing in small space”. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (pp. 607-626). 

Gilad Itach was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Between North and South: A Comparative Study of Assyrian Policies in the West, based on the Finds in the Provinces of Kinalia and Samaria". At the University of Chicago he will research the Neo-Assyrian empire's control of its western periphery by means of a comparative study between different provinces.

Gilad’s PhD research was conducted at Bar-Ilan University and focused on different aspects of the influences of the Neo-Assyrian Empire on the southern Levant, mostly as regards the province of Samaria.

Gilad is an archaeologist who works at the Israel Antiquities Authority. In recent years he directed excavations at several biblical sites in Israel.

Gilad's recent publications include:

Itach G. Forthcoming. “The Assyrian Interests in the Western Part of the Province of Samaria – A case Study from Khallat es-Siḥrij and its Vicinity”. In Koch I. (ed.) To and From the Levant: Mass-Deportations during the Age of the Empires. Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel.

Itach G. et al. (2019). “Late Chalcolithic Remains south of Wienhaus Street in Yehud, Central Coastal Plain, Israel”. Journal of the Israel Prehistory Society 49: 190-283.

Itach G. (2018). “The Kingdom of Israel in the Eighth Century: From Regional Power to Assyrian Provinces”. In: Z.I. Farber and Jacob L.W. (eds). Archaeology and History of Eighth-Century Judah. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press. Pp. 57-77.

Itach G. et al. (2017). “The Wedge-Impressed Bowl and the Assyrian Deportation”. Tel Aviv 44/1: 72-97.

Yael Kariv-Teitelbaum was awarded a Fulbright-ISEF Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled ‟The Comeback of the State? Government Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic”. The research will explore the role of the regulatory state in times of crisis, focusing on the similarities and differences in governments' regulatory responses to the coronavirus crisis and its reflection of their national regulatory style.

In her PhD research, Yael is studying the privatization of regulation. She examines this rapidly evolving phenomenon by tracing its intellectual origins, classifying different modes and mechanisms, identifying common legal concerns and new regulatory challenges and analyzing central promises and pitfalls.

Yael was awarded the President`s doctoral Fellowship for an Outstanding PhD student, the Cheshin Fellowship for Law Faculty Research Fellows, and the Hoffman Leadership and Responsibility Fellowship.

Yael has an LL.B. degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Law and Psychology (Summa cum laude).

Yael`s recent publications include:

Kariv-Teitelbaum, Y (forthcoming 2021). The Privatization of Regulation: Promises and Pitfalls, in The Cambridge Handbook on Privatization (Cambridge University Press.

Kariv-Teitelbaum, Y (2018). The Privatization of Regulation in Israel, in Privatization in Israel, Palgrave Macmillan.

Ido Levin was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project focusing on active solids. He is particularly fascinated by shape-morphing structures, especially in the interplay between their shape, geometry and mechanical properties. In his PhD he studied, experimentally and theoretically, shape-morphing pathways of active thin sheets. His research was supported by the Azrieli Foundation.

Ido’s recent publications include:

Levin, I*, Siéfert, E*, Sharon, E & Maor, C (2021), “Hierarchy of Geometrical Frustration in Elastic Ribbons: shape-transitions and energy scaling obtained from a general asymptotic theory”, arXiv, 2102.0644 (under review).

Siéfert E*, Levin I*& Sharon E (2021). “Euclidean Frustrated Ribbons”, Phys. Rev. X (accepted).

Levin, I, Siéfert, E, Sharon,  E (2020), “Self-Oscillating Membranes: chemo-mechanical sheets show autonomous periodic shape-transformation”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125 178001.

Ido Levin, and Eran Sharon (2016), “Anomalously Soft non-Euclidean Springs”, Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 035502 (PRL Editors' Suggestion).

Moshe, M, Levin, I, Aharoni, I, Kupferman, R & Sharon, E (2015) “Geometry and mechanics of two-dimensional defects in amorphous materials”, PNAS. 112 10873.

Hanan Mazeh was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Constructing Jewish Legal Territory: The Land of Israel in the Palestinian Talmud”. The project, part of a research group at The Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, explores the reconceptualization of the Land of Israel as a “halakhic territory” in the field of agricultural law in the corpus of rabbinic texts from Roman Palestine from the first century CE. It aims to shed light on the rabbis’ attempts to give meaning to, and thereby to preserve some form of control over, the Jewish territory as part of their identity struggle as a conquered community under Rome.

Hanan is a Kreitman postdoctoral fellow in History at Ben-Gurion University and an awardee of the Rothschild postdoctoral fellowship. His PhD dissertation in Jewish History at Ben-Gurion University focused on halakhic developments and rabbinic attitudes towards non-Jews and their presence in the Palestinian Talmud, by an integrated philological-historical examination of one of its tractates. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Talmudic Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Hanan's recent publications include:

Mazeh, H (2021). “Gentiles, Suspected Jews and Other ‘Others’: Textual, Halakhic and Social Developments in the Tosefta” [Hebrew], Te'uda 31, 315–347.

Mazeh, H (2020). “‘Built, Destroyed and Built Again’: The Temple and History in Genesis Rabbah, in Light of Christian Sources”, The Jewish Quarterly Review 110 (2020), 652–678.

Mazeh, H (2018). “‘Uprooting from the Mishnah’ – Halakhic Complexity and Legal Changes in the Eyes of Sages in the Palestinian Talmud” [Hebrew], Judaism, Sovereignty and Human Rights 4 (2018), 54–84.

Mazeh, H (2016). “‘The Original Conception of Dinah Was as a Male’: The Origin and Development of an Aggadic Tradition in Rabbinic Literature” [Hebrew], Jerusalem Studies in Hebrew Literature 28, 55–82.

Mazeh, H (2016). “‘He Who Has Said This Did Not Say That’: The Origin and Development of the Speaker Splitting Technique in Rabbinic Midrash” [Hebrew], Jewish Studies 51, 1–29.

Lior Michaeli was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Optical Dynamic Control of Macroscopic Objects”, under the supervision of Prof Harry Atwater at Caltech. This research deals with mechanical manipulation of millimeter-to meter-scale objects by light, through its ability to exert forces. The research is part of the ambitious goal of the Breakthrough Starshot Initiative to launch laser-driven lightsails for space exploration.

Lior received his MSc and PhD in Physics from Tel Aviv University. In his PhD, conducted under the supervision of Prof. Tal Ellenbogen and Prof. Haim Suchowski, he investigated collective effects in two-dimensional nanoparticle arrays, known as metasurfaces. Among his results, he extended the formalism to analyze the collective dynamics to the nonlinear optical regime, where he found and demonstrated new resonant condition for enhanced nonlinearity.

Lior’s recent publications include:

L. Michaeli et al (2017). "Nonlinear surface lattice resonance in plasmonic nanoparticle arrays”. Physical Review Letters. 118, 243904

L. Michaeli et al (2020). "Near‐Infrared Tunable Surface Lattice Induced Transparency in a Plasmonic Metasurface." Laser & Photonics Reviews, 14, 1900204.

L. Michaeli et al (2020). "Spectral Interferometric Microscopy for Fast and Broadband Phase Characterization." Advanced Optical Materials, 8.16, 202000326

Molhm Nassir was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled ” Formation of C-N Bond-Based on Phosphorous 4-Member Ring Intermediate," under the supervision of Prof. Phil S. Baran at the SCRIPPS Research Institute, La Jolla, CA. In his research project, he will focus on the development of C-N bond.

This methodology will provide a very useful tool in both organic and medicinal chemistry. It is envisioned to be easy, simple, non-expensive, and with minimum synthetic steps for a formation of amines and amides. In addition, it is metal-free catalysis which makes it more suitable for industrial needs.

Molhm completed his PhD. at Bar-Ilan University where his research focused on “Synthesis and Evaluation of NPP1 Inhibitors as Potential Drugs for the Treatment of Osteoarthritis/CPPD”

Nassir is currently part of a research group at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem that focuses on the developments of novel methodologies for the investigation of stereoselective cycloaddition reactions of organoborons.

Molhm’s recent publications include:

Eghbarieh, N., Hanania N., Zamir A., Nassir M., Stein T., & Masarwa A. ChemXriv (2021). “Stereoselective Diels-Alder Reactions of gem-Diborylalkenes: Toward the Synthesis of gem-Diboron-Based Polymers via ROMP”. DOI: 10.26434/chemrxiv.13645622.v1

“Addressing Regio and Stereo-Specificity Challenges in the Synthesis of Nucleoside 2’,3’- Cyclic Monophosphate Analogs– a Rapid and Facile Synthesis of Nucleosides-2’,3’-O, Ophosphoro- thioate or -selenoate, and Elucidation of the Origin of the Rare Specificity”. Nassir M., B, Fischer Chemical Communications, 56(78), 11633-11636 (2020)

“Ultrasonic assisted synthesis of styrylpyridinium dyes: Optical properties and DFT calculations”. Saady, A., Sudhakar, P., Nassir M., & Gedanken, A. Ultrasonics Sonochemistry, 105182. (2020)

“Enantioselective Crystallization of Chiral Inorganic Crystals of ϵ‐Zn (OH) 2 with Amino Acids”. Otis, G., Nassir M., Zutta, M., Saady, A., Ruthstein, S., & Mastai, Y. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.  (2020). doi.org/10.1002/anie.202009061

Adi Sherzer was awarded  a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled: “Imagining a People: The Israeli Chief Rabbinate and the Jewish World.” The research focuses on the formation of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate as a state “church” during the 1940s and 1950s, and seeks to investigate the intersections between religion and nationalism and between Israel as a symbolic homeland and the Jewish Diaspora. Adi’s PhD dissertation focused on the place of Jewish symbols, rituals and traditions during the first Israeli Independence Days. His further studies include an analysis of David Ben-Gurion’s attitude to the Jewish past, and an overview of Israeli military education.

Adi was a guest fellow at Max-Webber Kolleg (Erfurt University), a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the head of the Research Forum for the Study of Liberal Judaism and Jewish Renewal in Israel, Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel & Zionism.

Assaf Shocher was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Transformation Relation Neural Networks"  at  the University of California Berkeley.  His PhD is in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision at the Weizmann Institute of Science.  He developed a framework called "Deep Internal Learning" for training a signal-specific neural network on a single datum for various tasks, exploiting its internal statistics. Assaf received his M.Sc. from the Weizmann Institute, B.Sc. in Physics and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Assaf was also awarded the Rothschild Fellowship.

Assaf’s recent publications include:

A Shocher, N Cohen, M Irani, (2018). "Zero-Shot Super-Resolution using Deep Internal Learning". 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’18)

Orly Tonkikh was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Relationship between continuity of care, nurse-family caregiver collaboration and functional outcomes of hospitalized older adults: a mixed methods study” at the University of California Davis. Her research will use mixed methods sequential explanatory design to learn the mechanisms by which caregivers and nurse staffing affect outcomes of hospitalized older adults. The findings could guide managers and policymakers when designing new big-data and health information technology models to generate a streamlined fit between the infrastructure and supply patterns of nursing care and the needs of the growing older population.

Orly’s PhD was conducted at the Cheryl Spencer Institute of Nursing Research at the University of Haifa, where she focused on the association between nurse staffing, hospitalization processes and functional outcomes.

Orly was awarded the Health Sciences Person-In-Training Award from the Gerontological Society of America and an advanced studies scholarship for outstanding research students from the Cheryl Spencer Institute of Nursing Research and the Graduate Studies Authority at the University of Haifa.

Orly’s recent publications include:

Tonkikh, O., Shadmi, E., Zisberg, A. “Food-intake assessment in acutely ill older internal medicine patients”. Geriatr Gerontol Int. 2019;19(9):890-5. doi: 10.1111/ggi.13744.

Tonkikh, O., Zisberg, A., Shadmi, E. “Association between continuity of nursing care and older adults’ hospitalization outcomes: retrospective observational study”. J Nurs Manag. 2020;28(5):1062-9. doi: 10.1111/jonm.13031.

Tonkikh, O., Zisberg, A., Shadmi, E. “The role of nurse staffing in the performance of function-preserving processes during acute hospitalization: A cross-sectional study”. Int J Nurs Stud. (Under review)

Neomi Frisch-Aviram was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Street Level Identities: Exploring Street Level Worker's Identity from a Micro, Meso, and Macro-Level Perspective”. In her PhD at the University of Haifa, she studied street- level policy entrepreneurship training in public organizations. In her postdoctoral research at the the University of California, Berkeley, she will combine theoretical and experimental approaches to explore how personal, organizational and cultural identities of street level bureaucrats relate to each other to affect decision making, and in turn, public service delivery. Neomi has a B.A degree in sociology and Jewish philosophy from the Hebrew University and an M.A degree in political science from the Hebrew University. Neomi is the recipient of ASPA's Best Paper Award (2017), ASPA's Founders' Fellows Award (2018) and the University of Haifa Public Administration Division Prize for Excellence (2019). Neomi's postdoctoral project aims to help policy makers and public administration managers as they work to construct programs and policies for preparing and maintaining a high-quality public service.

Neomi's recent publications include:

Neomi Frisch-Aviram, Itai Beeri and Nissim Cohen (2019). "Entrepreneurship in the Policy Process: Connecting Behavior and Context Using a Systematic Review of Policy Entrepreneurship Literature". Public Administration Review.

Neomi Frisch-Aviram, Nissim Cohen and Itai Beeri. (2019). "Linking Policy Entrepreneurship Characteristics and Strategies: Insights from A Systematic Review of 229 Case-studies". Policy Studies Journal.

Neomi Frisch-Aviram, Nissim Cohen and Itai Beeri. (2018). "Low-Level Bureaucrats, Local Government Regimes and Policy Entrepreneurship". Policy Sciences.

Leena Badran was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Protecting the Health of People with Severe Mental Illness: The Role of Outpatient Commitment” at the University of California, Berkeley. The proposed project aims to decide on the best service approach to help people with severe mental illness (SMI) improve their physical health and reduce their vulnerability to life-threatening conditions resulting from physical health problems. Her PhD research focused on the recommendations among Imams and Muslim social workers towards marriage, divorce and parenting of persons with intellectual or psychiatric disabilities based on vignettes which compiled based on rulings of the Sharia courts in Israel.

Her dissertation won “Ora Gilbar Award” – for outstanding PhD proposal and the “Council for Higher Education – Planning & Budgeting Committee” Scholarship for outstanding PhD students in Israel. Leena holds a B.A in Social Work from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with distinction and MA with distinction in the community Social Work from University of Haifa.

Leena’s recent publications include:

Gur, A., Gnaeem-Badran, L., & Stein. M. A. (2020). Social worker perspectives on marriage and parenting among Muslim men with intellectual disabilities in Israel, Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability. DOI: 10.3109/13668250.2019.1704346

Gur, A., Gnaeem-Badran, L., & Stein. M. A. (accepted). The Role of Grandparents in Israeli Muslim Families with Intellectually Disabled Fathers: Social Workers' Perspectives, Journal of Social Work. 

Gnaeem-Badran, L., & Gur, A. (accepted). Parenthood with Intellectual-Developmental Disabilities in Arab Society in Israel, Social Issues in Israel (Hebrew).

Or Eivgi was awarded the Fulbright Post-doctoral fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Seeing one out of many: Discovering single-molecule kinetics of olefin-metathesis polymerization catalysts” at…. He is focusing on the study of single molecule polymerization catalysts using fluorescence microscopy at the University of California, Irvine. The aim of this research is to open new horizons for catalysis and polymeric materials research. The properties of essentially all polymers, arise from the sum of individual selectivity choices at the single-catalyst level. Yet little is known about this single-catalyst behavior, because it is typically obscured by average catalyst behavior in the bulk. Fluorescence microscopy techniques have the ultimate sensitivity to observe single molecules, freeing the researcher from prior limitations.

In his PhD at Ben-Gurion University, Or developed methods to carry out selective photochemical reactions using molecular UV filters and developed new photoswitchable metathesis catalysts. These catalysts can be used for various light induced olefin metathesis applications including the 3D printing of polymeric materials using light.

Or's recent publications include:

Eivgi, O., Lemcoff, N. G. et al. ACS catal., 2020, 10, 2033

Eivgi, O., Lemcoff, N. G. et al. ACS catal., 2018, 8, 6413

Eivgi, O., Lemcoff, N. G. et al. Org Lett., 2015, 17, 740

Britt Hadar was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “The Effect of Social Power on the Exploration-Exploitation Dilemma”.

Britt has a BA in psychology and philosophy, MA in cognitive psychology, and a PhD in social psychology, all from Tel Aviv University. Britt’s research explores how sense of social power affects basic information processing mechanisms.

In her postdoctoral research at Princeton University, she will combine cognitive and computational techniques to study how sense of social power affects the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation in decision-making.

Britt’s recent publications include:

Hadar, B., Luria, R., & Liberman, N. (2019). Induced social power improves visual working memory. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 46(2), 285-297.

Hadar, B., Luria, R., & Liberman, N. (2019). Concrete mindset impairs filtering in visual working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review ,26, 1917-1924.

Ofir Haim was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “On the Fringes of the Iranian World: The Social History of Medieval Afghanistan in Light of the Afghan Geniza”. The project explores the early Islamic history of the eastern Iranian world and the neighboring regions by viewing the society both “from below” and from its territorial and denominational fringes. It is based on an analysis of the “Afghan Geniza,” a rich trove of texts in a variety of languages, principally Persian, Arabic and Hebrew, which is still not fully available to the broader academic community. His PhD research, conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, focused on the intellectual and religious heritage of the Jewish Persian-speaking communities during the first centuries of Islam. During his doctoral studies, Ofir was the recipient of the Rotenstreich scholarship for outstanding PhD students.

Ofir’s recent publications include:

Haim, O. “Acknowledgment deeds (iqrārs) in Early New Persian from the Area of Bāmiyān (395-430 AH/1005-1039 CE).” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 29/3 (2019), pp. 415-446.

Haim, O. “The Islamic East.” In The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 5, The Middle Ages: The Islamic World. Edited by P. Ackerman-Lieberman and M. Rustow. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2020).

Noa Katz was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled "Programming Safe Neurogenesis with Synthetic Biology". This research will implement engineering-inspired therapeutic strategies to enhance nerve regeneration, without compromising safety. This will be achieved by implementing Synthetic Biology tools to apply quantitative and precise control over axon regeneration at the injured site. Her PhD research focused on the application aspect of protein-RNA interactions, as well as basic insight on a structure-function relationship of RNA. More specifically, she implemented high-throughput experimental techniques with machine learning approaches to improve RNA imaging technology.

Noa’s recent publications include:

Katz, N., Cohen, R., Solomon, O., Kaufmann, B., Atar, O., Yakhini, Z., Goldberg, S., and Amit, R. (2019). Synthetic 5′ UTRs Can Either Up- or Downregulate Expression upon RNA-Binding Protein Binding. Cell Systems. 10.1016/j.cels.2019.04.007.

Katz, N., Cohen, R., Atar, O., Goldberg, S., Amit, R. (2019) An Assay for Quantifying Protein-RNA Binding in Bacteria. Journal of Visualized Experiment. (148), e59611, doi:10.3791/59611.

Katz, N., Cohen, R., Solomon, O., Kaufmann, B., Atar, O., Yakhini, Z., Goldberg, S., and Amit, R. (2018) An in Vivo Binding Assay for RNA-Binding Proteins Based on Repression of a Reporter Gene. ACS Synthetic Biology. 7, 12, 2765-2774. Accepted for journal supplementary cover art.

Israel Kellersztein was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled: “Bioinspired Bouligands: Length-scale Matters” at Caltech. This research will investigate the origins of structural robustness in helicoidal architectures to attain a better scientific understanding on how  nature  uses  hierarchical structures to manage different mechanical stresses to maximize functionality, leading to synthetic bioinspired composite materials with enhanced structural properties.

Israel’s PhD research at the Weizmann Institute of Science studies the relationship between structure and mechanical performance of the exoskeleton of scorpion pincers at different length-scales. By studying these biological composites, Israel is working  to  determine the design  principles  to  create engineering materials with superior strength and toughness.

Israel has been involved in youth education programs, developing hands-on lab projects suitable for the age group and skills of the young participants and mentoring them throughout their projects.

Israel’s recent publications include:

Kellersztein, I., Cohen, S. R., Bar-On, B. & Wagner, H. D. The exoskeleton of scorpions’ pincers: structure and micro-mechanical properties. Acta Biomater. 94, 565–573 (2019).

Kellersztein, I.*, Greenfeld, I.*, & Wagner, H.D. Nested helicoids in biological microstructures. Nat Commun 11, 224 (2020). *Equal contribution

Maayan Keshev was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled "The interaction of discourse and syntax in language comprehension: A cross-linguistic study of person agreement".

The project will focus on the robustness of linguistic representations in incremental sentence comprehension, asking how well readers manage to get to the end of the sentence with a precise memory of what they previously processed. Specifically, the project aims to exhibit, using eyetracking-while-reading experiments, that the sentence’s meaning may interfere with memory of syntactic features.

In her PhD research, Maayan investigated the extent to which readers consider the possibility of minor errors (e.g. typos). She suggests that readers use rational inference considering the possibility of errors, and elaborate frequency mapping of different sentence types.

Maayan was a fellow of Arian de Rothschild fellowship for women doctoral (2016-2020). She also holds a M.Sc. from Sagol School of Neuroscience and graduated from the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students (both at Tel Aviv University).

Maayan’s recent publications include:

Keshev, M. & Meltzer-Asscher A. (2020). The effects of syntactic pressures and pragmatic considerations on predictive dependency formation. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35(2), 256–272.

Keshev, M. & Meltzer-Asscher A. (2019). A processing-based account of subliminal wh-island effects. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 37(2), 621-657.

Muhammad Khatib was awarded the Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “A Tissue-Like Electrically and Chemically Functional Platform for Neural Recording and Modulation” at Stanford University. This research aims to explore new multifunctional devices capable of forming intimate interfaces with neurons without provoking severe foreign-body responses. This would facilitate the detailed mapping of neural activities and serve as efficient neuroprosthetic links with electronic circuits. Such devices can be used for tackling fundamental questions in neuroscience and as powerful tools for treatment of neurological diseases. His PhD research focused on the development of soft sensing materials and electronic skins for wearable diagnostic applications, robotics, and prosthetics.

Muhammad’s recent publications include:

M. Khatib, T.-P. Huynh, Y. Deng, Y. D. Horev, W. Saliba, W. Wu, and H. Haick. "A freestanding stretchable and multifunctional transistor with intrinsic self‐healing properties of all device components." Small 15, no. 2 (2019): 1803939.

M. Khatib, T.-P. Huynh, J. J. Sun, T. T. Do, P. Sonar, F. Hinkel, K. Müllen, and H. Haick. "Organic Transistor Based on Cyclopentadithiophene‐Benzothiadiazole Donor–Acceptor Copolymer for the Detection and Discrimination between Multiple Structural Isomers." Advanced Functional Materials 29, no. 9 (2019): 1808188.

Fulbright-ISEF fellow, Natalie Fardian-Melamed was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research focusing on investigating and controlling light-matter interactions at the nanoscale, and using light to probe local environments, revealing unique physical and chemical behaviors at relevant length scales and in real conditions. 

Throughout her PhD research, Natalie has measured and characterized the electronic level structure and morphology of various novel DNA-based molecules at different temperatures, through single molecule scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy (STM and STS) studies.

In the course of her postdoctoral studies, Natalie intends on developing an optical analog to the STM probe, enabling the elucidation of optoelectronic properties of unique, and technologically relevant, nanostructures - on the single-digit nanometer length scale.

Natalie’s recent publications include:

Fardian-Melamed N, Eidelshtein G, Rotem D, Kotlyar A and Porath D (2020). “Temperature Dependence of the STM Morphology and Electronic Level Structure of Silver-Containing DNA”. Small, 16(5), 1905901

Fardian-Melamed N, Eidelshtein G, Rotem D, Kotlyar A and Porath D (2019). “Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and Spectroscopy of Novel Silver-Containing DNA Molecules”. Advanced Materials, 31(35), 1902816

Gal Mendelson was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project focusing on data driven resource utilization. He is particularly interested in developing and analyzing a data driven load balancing framework for computer cluster applications such as data centers and cloud computing.  In his PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, he worked on the design and analysis of new load balancing algorithms for systems with challenging resource constraints and performance cost tradeoffs in the areas of low communication, replication and cancellation and consistent hashing. Gal’s work on diffusion scale analysis of time varying queueing networks was awarded the 2019 Informs Applied Probability Society best student paper award.

Gal’s recent publications include:

Atar, R., Keslassy, I., & Mendelson, G. (2019). “Subdiffusive Load Balancing in Time-Varying Queueing Systems.” Operations Research, 67(6), 1678-1698.‏

Atar, R., Keslassy, I., Mendelson, G., Orda, A., & Vargaftik, S. (2019). Persistent-idle load-distribution. To appear in Stochastic Systems.‏

Atar, R., Keslassy, I., & Mendelson, G. (2019). Replicate to the shortest queues. Queueing Systems, 92(1-2), 1-23.‏

Yael Millgram was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue her research project titled: “Choosing Rumination in Depression”. The project aims to examine whether and how often people who suffer from depression voluntarily choose to use rumination- an emotion regulation strategy associated with depression maintenance and recurrence. Such investigation could provide clues into potential motivational factors underlying the use of rumination in depression.

Yael completed here B.A., M.A. and PhD in clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  Her PhD focused on assessing what depressed individuals want to feel (i.e., emotion goals), and the potential implications of emotion goals in depression for mental health.

Yael’s recent publications include:

Millgram, Y.,  Huppert, J.D., & Tamir, M. (in press). Emotion Goals in Psychopathology: A New Perspective on Dysfunctional Emotion Regulation. Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Millgram, Y., Joormann, J., Huppert, J. D., Lampert, A., & Tamir, M. (2019). Motivations to experience happiness and sadness in depression: Temporal stability and implications for coping with stress. Clinical Psychological Science, 7, 143-161.

Tamar Rotman was awarded a Fulbright post-doctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project “Constructing Identities in Late Antique and Early Medieval Hagiography”. Her project examines hagiographical collections that were written during the sixth and seventh centuries in Italy, Gaul and Spain. The project offers new methods to study the identity discourse in the early Medieval Latin West by combining methods and theories taken from history, philology, literature, and religious studies.

In her PhD research, which was conducted at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Tamar focused on the hagiographical collections of the sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours. She demonstrated there that these works were written for the purpose of recording the ecclesiastical history of Merovingian Gaul and forging a Gallo-Christian identity. Her study shows that Hagiography is an extremely important cultural product and, as such, it sheds precious and unique light on current events, social changes, political quarrels, religious conflicts, and cultural tendencies. As a post-doctoral fellow at Bar Ilan University, Tamar conducted a study on the auto-hagiography of Gregory of Tours, thus offering new ways to understand sainthood and identity in the early Middle Ages.

Tamar holds a B.A. in Art History and History, an M.A. in History, and a PhD in History. All were received by Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

Tamar’s recent publications include:

“Voluntary Martyrdom in Ancient Christianity and the Deaths of Agathonice”, Historia: Journal of the Historical Society of Israel 35 (2015), pp. 5-30 [in Hebrew]

Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, Pia Lucas, Tamar Rotman (eds.), The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World. Revisiting the Sources, Bloomsbury 2019

“Imitation and Rejection of Eastern Practices in Merovingian Gaul: Gregory of Tours and Vulfilaic the Stylite of Trier”, in The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Mediterranean World. Revisiting the Sources, eds. Stefan Esders, Yitzhak Hen, Pia Lucas, and Tamar Rotman (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), pp. 113-123

Hagiography, Historiography, and Identity in Sixth-Century Gaul: Uncovering the Miracle Collections of Gregory of Tours, forthcoming in Amsterdam University Press

Roy Zektzer was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research on constructing a nano-scale electro-optic quantum interface. Roy plans to develop nano-photonic devices that could strongly interact with Q-bits embedded in solid crystals while preserving their long coherence time. These Q-bits can be manipulated by RF signals and optical signals, enabling communication between quantum computers and quantum sensors.

Roy received his bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D.  degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Roy’s Ph.D. work deals with the challenge and the opportunity of integrating atoms (rubidium) and molecules (Acetylene) with nano-photonic devices. By precisely controlling light-matter interactions, Roy was able to fabricate and demonstrate chip scale devices that excite atoms in the same way as in a bulky free space system, with centimeters long interaction regions. Such excitation is achieved using circularly polarized light and with no excess broadening and decoherence.

Roy's recent publications include:

Roy Zektzer, Eliran Talker, Yefim Barash, Noa Mazurski, Uriel Levy, "Chiral light–matter interactions in hot vapor-cladded waveguides" Optica (2019).

R. Zektzer, L. Stern, N. Mazurski, U. Levy, "Enhanced light–matter interactions in plasmonic–molecular gas hybrid system" Optica (2018).

Miri Adler was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Principles of Cell Communication Circuits for Tissue Homeostasis in Health and Disease”.

In her PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science she studies how different cell types communicate through the production of growth factors in order to maintain healthy celltype ratios.

In her postdoctoral research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard she will combine theoretical and experimental approaches to explore cell communication circuits in response to inflammatory cues and environmental stresses. Miri's aim is to study the principles underlying the communication between different cell types that allow tissues to respond properly to perturbations such as injury and inflammation. Understanding these principles is important since it can illuminate how homeostasis is derailed in diseases including degeneration, fibrosis and cancer.

Miri's recent publication include:

Adler, M, Korem Kohanim, Y, Tendler, A, Mayo, A, and Alon, U (2019). "Continuum of Gene-Expression Profiles Provides Spatial Division of Labor within a Differentiated Cell Type." Cell Syst. 8, 43-52.e5.

Zhou, X*, Franklin, R A*, Adler, M*, Jacox, J B, Bailis, W, Shyer, J A, Flavell, R, Mayo, A, Medzhitov, R & Alon, U (2018). "Circuit design features of a stable two-cell system." Cell 172, 744-757 e717.

Miri Blau was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled "Quantum integrated photonic circuits for Quantum Networks" at Columbia University. This research aims to investigate quantum photonic integrated circuits (QPICs) based on the platform of classical photonic integrated circuits developed for the telecommunications industry. Quantum communications, enabled by quantum photonic integrated circuits, will allow for absolute secure worldwide communications.

Miri’s Ph.D. research deals with space division multiplexing (SDM) for overcoming the capacity crunch experienced in conventional, single-mode fiber based optical communications. She demonstrated how SDM fiber and novel optical networking components can achieve higher capacities at lower implementation costs.

Miri’s recent publications include:

Blau M. & Marom D. M. (2019). "Wavelength Demultiplexer Designs Operating over Multiple Spatial Modes of a Rectangular Waveguide." accepted to the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.

Maor Farid was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project focusing on nonlinear dynamics and chaos. He is particularly interested in modelling of mechanical systems, which aim to increase seismic protection of structures and facilities with major national interest.

In his PhD degree, he worked on modelling and exploration of liquid sloshing in partially-filled storage tanks, investigating their robustness for major earthquakes. This study, carried in parallel to his military service as a captain in the 'Brakim' excellence program, was later awarded by the PAZI foundation of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission. Maor completed his PhD at the age of 24 at the Technion. Maor is the founder and CEO of 'Lilmod Lehatsliach' (Hebrew: Learn to Succeed) association, a non-profit organization, aiming to promote youth at risk and undergraduate students from the Israeli periphery. Recently, he was elected on the Forbes list of 30 under 30 for 2019.

Maor’s recent publications include:

M. Farid and O. V Gendelman, “Escape of a harmonically forced classical particle from an asymmetric potential well,” in-preparation.

M. Farid and O. V. Gendelman, “Response Regimes in Equivalent Mechanical Model of Moderately Nonlinear Liquid Sloshing,” Mar. 2017.

Demitry Farfurnik was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research on enhancing the quantum properties of semiconductor quantum dots. In particular, Demitry plans to utilize advanced schemes for extending the coherence times (during which a system maintains its quantum properties) of quantum dots, towards the development of integrated quantum photonic devices for scalable quantum information processing on-chip.

This project will strongly rely on Demitry's PhD research, during which he utilized such (dynamical decoupling) control schemes for extending the coherence times of nitrogenvacancy centers in diamond, while demonstrating improvements in magnetic sensing and novel studies of many-body physics.

Demitry's recent publications include:

D. Farfurnik, Y. Horowicz and N. Bar-Gill, "Identifying and decoupling many-body interactions in spin ensembles in diamond." Phys. Rev. A 98, 033409 (2018)

D. Farfurnik, A. Jarmola, D. Budker and N. Bar-Gill, "Spin ensemble-based AC magnetometry using concatenated dynamical decoupling at low temperatures." J. Opt. 20 024008 (2018)

Valeri Frumkin was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Hydrodynamic Quantum Analog Systems Beyond the Faraday Threshold” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This research will investigate the complex interaction of bouncing droplets with Faraday waves arising at a gas-liquid interface, allowing deeper understanding of hydrodynamic quantum analog systems.

His PhD research was focused on developing novel theoretical models for transporting liquids in microscopic labon-a-chip environments by means of the thermocapillary effect.

Valeri’s recent publications include:

V. Frumkin and M. Bercovici, “Dipolar thermocapillary motor and swimmer.” arXiv, (2018).

V. Frumkin and A. Oron (2018), “Nonlinear dynamics of a sustained thermocapillary flow of a thin liquid film in a confined two-layer system under a hydrophobic surface.” Proceedings of the 16th International Heat Transfer Conference, IHTC-16, August 10-15, 2018, Beijing, China. Paper IHTC16-22105. Begell Publishing House.

Samer Gnaim was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled "Fishing the Bio-active Target: New Opening for Diazirine Photoaffinity Probes," under the supervision of Prof. Phil S. Baran at the SCRIPPS Research Institute, La Jolla, CA.

In this project, he will utilize chemical synthesis to establish the basis for target identification of biologically active compounds, such as; small molecule drugs, amino acids, linear and cyclic peptides. This will be accomplished by simple modification of unactivated C−H bonds of the bioactive molecule with diazirine functional group, used to link the bioactive molecule to its target. Such studies would pave the way for a variety of applications such as tagging of nucleic acids, antibodies, and even enzymes with the aim to understand their mechanism of action.

His PhD research focused on the development of new approaches for targeted drug delivery systems, and the development of self-immolative chemiluminescence probes for diagnostic and theranostic purposes. Samer is the recipient of the “ICS-Prize” for an excellent graduate student awarded by the Israel Chemical Society.

Samer's recent publications include:

Gnaim, S. and Shabat D. "Chemiluminescence Molecular Probe with a Linear Chain Reaction (LCR) Amplification Mechanism.” Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry, 2019, 17, 1389-1394.

Gnaim, S., Scomparin, A., Blau, R., Satchi-Fainaro, R. and Shabat D. "Supramolecular Chemiluminescence Probes Constructed of Stimuli-Responsive 1,2 Dioxetane and Host-Guest Inclusion for Bioimaging.” Chemical Science, 2019, 10, 2945-2955

Muhammad Jbara was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Macrocyclization of therapeutic peptides to target protein-protein interactions” at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research is aimed to develop new synthetic method to expand the field of known macrocyclic peptide inhibitors to perturb important Protein-protein Interactions for therapeutic peptides development.

His PhD research was conducted in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. This research focuses on the development of new tools for the chemical synthesis of complex modified histone proteins in order to understand the molecular basis of epigenetics. He discovered novel chemical approaches using palladium complexes to accelerate the synthesis and manipulation of various challenging proteins.

Muhammad’s recent publications include:

M. Jbara, S. Laps, M. Morgan, G. Kamnesky, G. Mann, C. Wolberger, A. Brik. ‘’Palladium Prompted On-Demand Orthogonal Cysteine Chemistry for the Synthesis of Challenging and Uniquely Modified Proteins.’’ Nature Communications, 2018, 9, DOI:10.1038/s41467-018-05628-0.

M. Jbara, S. K. Maity, A. Brik. ‘’Palladium in the Chemical Synthesis and Modification of Proteins.’’ Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2017, 56, 10644 –10655.

Fulbright-ISEF fellow, Tammy Katsabian was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Managerial “Outsourcing” in the Internet Age and its Implications on Equality and Due Process in the Workplace”. This research examines how the internet age, particularly technological devices based on information sharing, have enabled numerous anonymous new actors to participate in the workplace environment, and to directly affect the employee’s professional track and her right to be protected from unjust conduct or discrimination.

In her PhD research, Tammy focused on labor rights in the internet age. The research is based on sociological, legal, and internet scholarship and is presented in a series of three articles on the effects of the internet age on sphere, time, and community in the labor field. Tammy was awarded the President's Doctoral Fellowship for an Outstanding PhD student and the “Research Fellows” Scholarship by the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University. Her article on Working Time in the Internet Age (Hebrew) received Menachem Goldberg Prize given for an excellent article in the subject of labor law. Tammy has an LL.M. degree from Yale Law School, LL.M. degree from Tel-Aviv University (magna cum laude) and LL.B. degree from Bar Ilan University (magna cum laude).

Tammy’s recent publications include:

Katsabian Tammy, “Employees’ Privacy in the Internet Age: Towards a New Procedural Approach.” forthcoming In Berkeley Journal of Employment and Law. (BJELL) (English).

Katsabian Tammy, “The Right of Income Support Benefit Recipients for Legal Representation – between Theory and Practice, between the Recipients and the Court.” forthcoming in Bar-Ilan Law Studies. (Hebrew).

Nimrod Jackob Keynan was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Modeling Temporal Dynamics of the Human Brain Function" at Stanford University. The project aims to conduct deep longitudinal phenotyping of individuals to model both interand intra-individual variations in brain functions across time and its relation to changes in cognitive and emotional processes. Such deep phenotyping of individuals could facilitate the development of novel, personalized and mechanism-based diagnosis and treatment in psychiatry.

His PhD was conducted at the Sagol Brain Institute, Tel-Aviv Sourasky Medical Center & Tel- Aviv University. The PhD focused on developing a novel and scalable method for volitional neuromodualtion of the human amygdala to enhance stress resilience.

Nimrod's recent publications include:

Keynan JN, Cohen A, Jackont G, … & Hendler T (2019). "Electrical Fingerprint of the Amygdala Guides Neurofeedback Training for Stress Resilience." Nature Human Behaviour, 3(1), 63.

Keynan JN, Meir-Hasson Y, Gilam G, ... & Hendler T (2016). "Limbic Activity Modulation Guided by fMRI-Inspired EEG Improves Implicit Emotion Regulation." Biological Psychiatry, 80(6), 490-496.

Ariel Kopilovitz was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Shedding New Light on Ancient Writings: The Āl-Yāhūdu Tablets and Exilic Biblical Literature” at the University of Chicago. This research will investigate the identity, history, culture, and religion of the Judean exiles in Babylonia during the first generations after the destruction of the First Temple, as manifested in the Āl-Yāhūdu cuneiform tablets and the exilic period biblical literature.

His PhD research was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and focused on the descriptions of Israel’s future in Ezekiel’s restoration oracles. During this period Ariel taught at the Bible department.

Ariel’s recent publications include:

A. Kopilovitz, “What Kind of Priestly Writings did Ezekiel Know?,” in The Formation of the Pentateuch – Bridging the Academic Cultures of Europe, Israel and North America (FAT 111;J.C. Gertz et al. eds.; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 1041–1054.

Moran Koren was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled: "Market Design with Incomplete Information: Improving Efficiency of Transplant Organ Allocations.” The research will investigate the efficiency of allocation systems in the presence of uncertainty. Special emphasis will be given to the allocation process of deceased donor transplant organs. By combining theoretical modeling with an econometric estimation, the research will look into the efficiency of existing allocation systems and design mechanisms which better utilize this scarce resource.

Moran’s PhD research, conducted at the Technion, studied questions of information aggregation in economic systems. His research extended the literature of information cascades to novel environments, inspired by applications in economics and computer science. Moran was awarded an Excellence Scholarship by the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management at the Technion, and have received research grants from the Bernard M.Gordon Center for System Engineering, and the Harold and Inge Marcus Endowment for Technion/PSU IE Partnership. Moran also holds a B.A. (magna cum laude) in economics and business administration from the Hebrew University, and a research-oriented M.A. in economics from the joint program of the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University.

Moran’s recent publications include:

Arieli Itai, Moran Koren, and Rann Smorodinsky. "The One-Shot Crowdfunding Game." Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. ACM, 2018.

Hillel Mali was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled "From Priestly Literature to the Order of Holy Things: The Relationship between Ritual and Law." In this project, he examines the ways in which ritual language and ritual texts influenced the creation and development of rabbinic law.

Hillel completed his PhD ("Descriptions of the Temple in the Mishna: History, Redaction and Meaning") under the supervision of the late Professor Aharon Shemesh. He joined a research group led by Dr. Naphtali Meshel, "Thinking Rite: A New and Ancient Science of Ritual" at The Hebrew University, focusing on new comparative models for the analysis of ritual systems. Hillel is the recipient of the President's Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Students (2014-2018), Nathan Rotenstreich Scholarship for Outstanding Graduate Students (2016-2018), the Orion Center Research Scholarship (2018), and Riklis Prize for Academic Excellence in Jewish Studies (2018). Hillel established the ensemble, "Nigun Yerushalmi," which performs world music played on antique instruments.

Hillel’s recent publications include:

"Priestly Instructions in the Aramaic Levi Document and the Order of the Morning Daily Sacrifice," Megilot 14 (2019) "Conceptual and Ideological Aspects in the Mishnaic Description of Bringing the First Fruit to Jerusalem," G. Stemberger (ed.), Religious Dynamics in Jewish and Christian Context, Brill 2019

Tom Noah was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “How the Sensation of Being Watched Affects Self Regulation in Learning and Problem Solving”.

Tom has an LLB in law and cognitive sciences, an MA in cognitive sciences, and a PHD in social psychology with specialization in the study of rationality, all of them from the Hebrew University. Tom’s research explores how the feeling of being observed by others affects cognitive processes of judgment, decisions, and self regulation.

Tom’s recent publications include:

Noah, T., Schul, Y., & Mayo, R. (2018). "Thinking of oneself as an object of observation reduces reliance on metacognitive information." Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(7), 1023-1042.

Noah, T., Schul, Y., & Mayo, R. (2018). "When both the original study and its failed replication are correct: Feeling observed eliminates the facial-feedback effect." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(5), 657-664.

Asaf Ziderman was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Humanizing Metaphysics: Toward an Action-Based Ontology." This research project seeks to reconstruct an ontological picture of reality that views the world as consisting primarily of actions. Asaf examines works of the Jewish social thinkers Moses Hess, Karl Marx, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, as well as the analytic philosophers of action John Macmurray and Edward Pols.

Asaf’s PhD research project, conducted at Tel Aviv University, reconstructs Buber’s dialogical thought as a philosophy of action. It shows that dialogical philosophy is essentially an internal argument in the field of philosophy of action, namely that an action in its perfected form is necessarily dialogical, i.e. carried out vis-a-vis a ‘You’.

During his PhD research, Asaf was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University for one year. Asaf is currently an Ignatz Bubis Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research center at the Hebrew University.

Peter Zilberg was awarded a Fullbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Fluid Borderlines-The Elamite-Babylonian Frontier During the Seventh and Sixth Centuries BCE” at the University of California, Berkeley. The study wishes to challenge our perspectives on Imperial control over peripheral areas and to present a unique and well-documented case study of frontier zones in antiquity by examining the case of the frontier between Iran and Babylonia, just before the rise of the Persian Empire (c. 550 BCE). Peter wishes to examine interactions between various ethnic groups and to better understand the impact of imperial powers on the unique cultural, social and economic situation in the frontier.

His PhD research analyzed socio-economic aspects of displaced and migrant minority groups in Babylonia and Iran. Peter was awarded The Rotenstreich scholarship for outstanding PhD students and was previously a member of the Mandel-Scholion research center.

Peter’s recent publication include:

Zilberg P., "Lands and Estates around āl-Yāhūdu and the Geographical Connection with the Murašû Archive." Archiv für Orientforschung 54 (forthcoming 2019).

Zilberg, P., and Levavi, Y., A new legal compendium from the Eanna archive, Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und vorderasiatische Archäologie (forthcoming 2019).

Moran Balaish was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled "A Lithium Solid-State Memristor- Modulating Interfaces and Defects for Novel Li-Ionic Operated Memory and Computing Architectures" at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This research will investigate lithium ionic carrier and defect kinetics in oxides to design material architectures and interfaces for novel Li-operated memristors as alternative memory and non-binary computing architectures.

Her PhD research focused on the development of a Perfluorocarbon modified air-cathode/non-aqueous electrolyte system for Lithium-oxygen batteries. Moran aims to fabricate design and investigate Li-type oxides as novel functional ceramic and glass-type oxides in memristors for information storage and computing.

Moran's recent publications include:

Balaish M. & Ein-Eli Y. (2017). "The Role of Air–Electrode Structure on the Incorporation of Immiscible PFCs in Non-aqueous Li–O2 Battery," Applied Materials and Interfaces, 9, 9726-9737.

Raphael I. Benhamou was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Rational Design of Small Molecules Targeting RNA“, under the supervision of Prof. Matthew D. Disney at the SCRIPPS Research Institute. In this project, he will utilize chemical synthesis and chemical similarity searching to develop a library of similar compounds to derive structure activity relationships (SAR) to selectively inhibit miR-210 with minimal effect on other RNAs. These studies will result in novel small molecules with nanomolar activities. Importantly, the results of these studies will identify the required chemical properties in a small molecule that are necessary to afford potent, selective, and cell permeable anti-miR-210 compounds. The collected results will contribute in designing of next generation of anti-miR-210 compounds and chemical probes to validate their targets.

He focused his Ph.D. research on the development of new antibacterial and antifungal compounds targeting the microbial membrane and of novel fluorescent molecular tools to be used as probes to study the mechanism of antifungal drugs.

Raphael's recent publications include:

Benhamou, R. I.; Shaul, P.; Herzog, I. M.; Fridman, M.; "Di-N-Methylation of Anti-Gram Positive Aminoglycoside-Derived Membrane Disruptors Improves Antimicrobial Potency and Broadens Spectrum to Gram Negative Bacteria," Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2015, 54, 13617-13621.

Benhamou, R. I.; Steinbuch, K. B. ; Fridman, M.; "Antifungal Imidazole-Decorated Cationic Amphiphiles with Markedly Low Hemolytic Activity," Chemistry A European Journal, 2016, 22,11148–11151.

Benhamou, R. I.; Bibi ,M. ; Steinbuch, K. B. ; Engel, H. ; Levin, M. ; Roichman, Y. ; Berman, J. ; Fridman, M.; "Fluorescent Probes for Real-Time Imaging of the Azole Class of Antifungal Drugs," ACS Chemical Biology, 2017, 12, 1769−1777.

Benhamou, R. I.; Bibi, M.; Berman, J.; Fridman, M.; " Localizing Antifungal Drugs to the Correct Organelle can Markedly Enhance their Efficacy,' Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2018, DOI: 10.1002/ anie.201802509.

Chen Edelsburg was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “’The Only Weapon at My Disposal’: Female Hysteria as a Strategy of Resistance in Hebrew Literature” at Stanford University. This research will investigate the portrayal of hysteria in the heroines of Hebrew literature by women writers, and afford deeper insight into hysteria as a literary form.

Her PhD research focused on the Author-Reader relationship in American and Hebrew postmodern literature. This research was conducted at Tel Aviv University. During this period Chen was a researcher at the Kipp Center for Hebrew Literature and Culture at Tel Aviv University and taught at the department of Literature.

Chen’s recent publications include:

Edelsburg, C. (2016). "When the pen is implanted in the body – the female author as cyborg," In, A. Shalev and Y. Ataria, eds., The Post- Human Era: From Fantasy to Eternal Life to Existential Panic, Pardes Publishing House, Haifa, 251-261 (Hebrew)

Edelsburg, C. (forthcoming in 2018). "'If you really want to hear about it': The double address in Salinger's works," Dappim: Research in Literature, Haifa University Press (Hebrew)

Yael Elster was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Evaluating the Housing Market Effects of the Residential Segregation of Ultra-Orthodox Jews” at Harvard University. This research relies on a theory of dynamic segregation which predicts that once the minority share in a neighborhood exceeds a “tipping point”, all the majority group leaves. Yael intends to examine whether such “tipping points” exist in the Israeli case and to explore the housing market effects of the segregation process.

Her PhD research focused on how the repeated rocket attacks against Israel affect electoral and economic outcomes. Yael was awarded the President's Doctoral Fellowship for an Outstanding PhD student by the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Hebrew University, and have received research grants from the Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research, the Pinhas Sapir Economic Policy Forum and the Swiss Center for Conflict Research, Management and Resolution.

Yael’s recent publications include:

Elster, Yael, Asaf Zussman, and Noam Zussman. 2017. "Rockets: The Housing Market Effects of a Credible Terrorist Threat," Journal of Urban Economics 99: 136-147.

Tsivia Frank-Wygoda was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Impossible Homeland, Paradoxical Longing, Shifting Belongings. The Place of Algeria in Contemporary French-Jewish Culture”. This research will analyze the presence, the memory and the function of Algeria in postcolonial French-Jewish culture, from the start of Algeria’s war of independence in 1954 to the present day, through the analysis of major literary works and their reception.

Tsivia’s PhD research on the Jewish-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès focused on the relationship between work-in-progress, poetics and interpretation of texts; it offered a new contextualization of Jabès’ rewriting of Jewish identity and textuality in post-war France, in the shade of the Holocaust and of the author’s exile from Egypt to France. Tsivia was part of the Honors Program for Outstanding Doctoral Students. Her dissertation received the Hans Wiener Prize in the Humanities. In the past two years, Tsivia has taught literature at the Department of French Culture at Bar-Ilan University.

Tsivia’s recent publications include:

Frank-Wygoda, Tsivia, “Death Chants: Paradigms and Translations in Semprún’s Writing,” Yale French Studies, April 2016, 129, pp. 70-84.

David Helman was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Forecasting Risks of Violent Conflict Outbreaks in Africa and the Middle East from the Climate–Scarcity–Conflict Nexus” at Johns Hopkins University. This research will seek for direct and indirect relations between climate, water/food scarcity and violence to establish a causal predictive model of potential violent outbreak risks.

His PhD research focused on ecohydrological responses of Mediterranean forests to climate change observed from satellites. Currently, David develops numerical as well as satellite-based water/crop models for early prediction of wheat yield as part of the Israeli Wheat Project (MIzam). He also works with on Precision Agriculture techniques.

David’s recent publications include:

Helman David (2018). “Land surface phenology: What do we really ‘see’ from space?” Science of the Total Environment, 618: 665–673. doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.07.237.

Helman David, et al. (2017). “Forests growing under dry conditions have higher hydrological resilience to drought than do more humid forests.” Global Change Biology, 23(7): 2801–2817. doi:10.1111/gcb.13551.

Efrat Herzberg Druker was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Does fertility matter? Changes in fertility and income inequality in the US” at the University of Wisconsin- Madison. This research examines the extent to which changes in fertility contributed to the rise in income inequality. More specifically, the research will examine the intersections between levels of fertility and education levels at the household level and examine the extent to which these changes and patterns contribute to the rise in income inequality.

Her PhD research focused on family demographic changes and the rise in income inequality in Israel. Upon completion of her dissertation, Efrat joined a research project at the University of Haifa that deals with computer use at the workplace and its contribution to the gender gaps in the labor market in the US.

Efrat’s recent publications include:

Stier, H., & Herzberg-Druker, E. (2017). Running ahead or running in place? Educational expansion and gender inequality in the labor market. Social Indicator Research.

Stier, H., & Herzberg, E. (2013). “Women in the Labor Force: The Impact of Education on Employment Patterns and Wages.” In D. Ben David (Ed.). State of the nation report: Society, economy and policy 2013 (pp. 201-232). Jerusalem: Taub Center.

Deborah Marciano was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “The Conformist Brain: a brain study of the influence of social information on decision-making”. This research will investigate the influence of conformity on decision making and its neural correlates.

Her PhD research focused on the electrophysiological correlates of outcome comparison, and used a combination of neuroscience techniques and behavioral economics paradigms. It was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During this period, Deborah was also the manager of Ratiolab, the interactive decision-making lab of the Ferdermann Center for the Study of Rationality, and she volunteered as a behavioral economics consultant for several governmental offices and organizations.

Deborah’s recent publications include:

Marciano, D., Krispin, E., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Deouell, L.Y. (Under review) "Limited resources or limited luck? Why people perceive an illusory negative correlation between the outcomes of choice options despite unequivocal evidence for independence".

Marciano, D., Bentin, S., & Deouell, L.Y. (2018). "Alternative outcomes create biased expectations regarding the received outcome: evidence from event-related potentials." Neuropsychologia Hassidim, A.,

Marciano D., Romm, A., & Shorrer, R. I. (2017) "The mechanism is truthful, why aren't you?", American Economic Review, 107(5):220-24.

Marciano-Romm, D., Romm, A., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., & Deouell, L. Y. (2016). "The Alternative Omen Effect: Illusory negative correlation between the outcomes of choice options." Cognition, 146, 324-338.

Rinat Meir was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled "Multifunctional Nano-Biomaterials for Biomedical Applications" at Columbia University. This research is aimed to develop and engineer advanced materials for targeted delivery of therapeutics in various medical applications.

She focused her Ph.D research on the development of nanoparticles for cancer diagnostics and targeted immunotherapy. Rinat's research is highly interdisciplinary as it merges chemistry, biology, medicine, materials science and engineering.

Rinat's recent publications include:

Meir R., Shamalov K., Sadan T., Motiei M., Yaari G., Cohen C. J., & Popovtzer R., (2017) “Fast Image-Guided Stratification Using Anti-PDL1 Gold Nanoparticles for Cancer Immunotherapy,” ACS Nano, 11(11):11127-11134.

Michael Peer was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research project titled “characterizing the brain’s large-scale space representation system” at the University of Pennsylvania. This research will investigate the neurocognitive systems used to encode cognitive maps of the large-scale environment, and their possible use to map other types of knowledge in more abstract domains.

His PhD research was conducted in the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center. This research focused on disruptions of brain networks in neuropsychiatric disorders, and on the use of similar brain mechanisms to orient in space, time and the social domain.

Michael’s recent publications include:

Peer M, Prüss H, Ben-Dayan I, Paul F, Arzy S, Finke C (2017). “Functional connectivity of large-scale brain networks in anti NMDA receptor encephalitis: an observational study,” The Lancet Psychiatry, 4 (10): 768-774.

Peer M, Nitzan M, Bick SA, Levin N, Arzy S (2017). “Evidence for functional networks within the human brain’s white matter,” Journal of Neuroscience, 37 (27): 6394-6407.

Peer M, Salomon R, Goldberg I, Blanke O, Arzy S (2015). “Brain system for mental orientation in space, time, and person,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(35), 11072-11077.

Rachel Rac-Lubashevsky was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled '"The role of reinforcement learning on control over working memory".

She completed her PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where she also taught courses. In the proposed study will investigate how learning form positive outcomes shapes the voluntary decision that a perceived or remembered information is relevant to be represented in working memory and to guide behavior. In her PhD research, she focused on understanding the neurocognitive properties of the controlled selection of information into working memory and how it differs from automatic selection of information.

Rachel’s recent publications include:

Rac-Lubashevsy, R., Slagter, H.A., and Kessler, Y. (2017). “Tracking Real Time Changes in Working Memory Updating and Gating with Event-Based Eye-Blink Rate.” Scientific Reports, 7:2547.

Rac-Lubashevsky, R., & Kessler, Y. (2016). “Dissociating controlled and automatic updating in working memory: The reference-back paradigm.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 42. 951-969.

Kiril Solovey was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project focusing on algorithmic aspects of robotics. He is particularly interested in robot motion planning, which aims to allow autonomous robots to effectively navigate in complex environments.

In his PhD degree he worked on multi-robot systems and sampling-based algorithms. During this time he was supported by the Clore Israel Foundation. His two recent publications have received best-paper awards.

Kiril’s recent publications include:

Kiril Solovey and Michal Kleinbort, “The Critical Radius in Sampling-Based Motion Planning”, arXiv, 2017.

Andrew Dobson, Kiril Solovey, Rahul Shome, Dan Halperin and Kostas E. Bekris, “Scalable Asymptotically-Optimal Multi-Robot Motion Planning,” in International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems, best paper award, 2017.

Kiril Solovey and Dan Halperin, “On the Hardness of Unlabeled Multi-Robot Motion Planning,” International Journal on Robotics Research, 2016.

Ilya Svetlizky was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Irreversible (Plastic) Deformation of Materials” at Harvard University. This research will use experimental model system to explore the underlying processes governing plastic deformation, over the different length scales involved.

His PhD research focused on rupture dynamics at the onset of frictional motion.

Ilya’s recent publications include:

Svetlizky et al (2017). “Frictional resistance within the wake of frictional rupture fronts,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 234301

Svetlizky et al (2017). “Brittle fracture theory predicts the equation of motion of frictional rupture fronts,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 125501

Svetlizky et al (2016). “Properties of the shear stress peak radiated ahead of rapidly accelerating rupture fronts that mediate frictional slip,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 113 (3), 542-547

Svetlizky & Fineberg (2014). “Classical shear cracks drive the onset of dry frictional motion,” Nature, 509, 205–208

Naomi Yuval Naeh was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Imagining the Carboniferous Period: Coal and Nature in Nineteenth Century Britain” At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This research will explore the place of coal in British culture as natural curiosity, intersecting imaginations of deep time, ideals of nature and industrial modernity.

Her PhD research was conducted at Tel Aviv University and focused on plants in nineteenth-century British urban culture. Education - PhD in History of Science, Tel Aviv University - MSc in Biology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem - BSc in Biology and Amirim Program in the Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Naomi’s recent publications include:

"The Botany Department in the Hebrew University 1948-1967," in The History of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, eds. Yfaat Weiss and Uzi Rebhun (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press)(Forthcoming)

Moshe Yagur was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research project titled "Interfaith residential patterns in Medieval Egypt according to Cairo Geniza documents." This research aims to document and analyze dwelling habits of Jews in medieval Egypt and the Levant, and their significance for inter-religious contacts and influences.

Moshe's PhD research examined cases of conversion to Judaism and from it in the Jewish communities of medieval Egypt and the Levant. Systematic analysis of these cases enriches our understanding concerning the way Jewish identity was perceived by the members of the community. During his research he was a fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters (CSOC). Upon completion of his dissertation, Moshe joined a research project studying the cultural significance of converts in medieval Islamic civilization.

Moshe’s recent publications include:

"The Donor and the Gravedigger: Converts to Judaism in the Cairo Geniza Documents,” in Contesting Inter-Religious Conversion in the Medieval World (Routledge 2017). “Jewish Communal History in Geniza Scholarship,” co-authored with Miriam Frenkel, in Jewish History. (Forthcoming)

Ayala S. Allon was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Compensation Mechanisms for Filtering Irrelevant Information” at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. This research will investigate filtering mechanisms that can improve individuals’ ability to filter out and ignore irrelevant information in the visual environment. Her PhD research was conducted at The School of Psychological Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, and focused on compensation mechanisms for improving filtering of distractors from entering visual working memory, their neural correlates and interactions of filtering mechanisms with perceptual grouping mechanisms. This research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Roy Luria. Ayala aims her research to serve as a basis for developing ways that improve filtering processes among clinical populations and for developing practical tools to improve performance in everyday life activities that require filtering of irrelevant information.

Recent publications include:

Allon, A. S, & Luria, R. (2017). Compensation mechanisms that improve distractor filtering are short-lived. Cognition, 164, 74-86. doi: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2017.03.020.

Nir Barak was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “City-zenship: Democracy, Urban Autonomy and National Citizenship” at Columbia University. This research will analyze the relationship between the rising power of cities in global politics, growing autonomy of cities vis-à-vis the state and democratic norms and practices in cities. 

His PhD research focused on environmental political theory in cities and analyzed philosophical, political, social and policy related aspects of transitioning cities to sustainable patterns. This research was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of Prof. Avner de Shalit. During this period Nir was a fellow in the “Human Rights-Under Pressure” joint interdisciplinary program of the Hebrew University and the Freie Universität Berlin and worked with Prof. Martina Löw as co-supervisor.

In addition to his academic work, Nir has a rich background of working in educational projects with disadvantaged teenagers.

Recent Publications include:

Barak Nir (forthcoming in July 2017), “Hundertwasser – Inspiration for Environmental Ethics: Reformulating the Ecological-Self”, Environmental Values.

Moshe Shay Ben-Haim was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Animal Consciousness and Non-Conscious Processing: A Direct Dissociation Study in Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris)” at Yale University (in collaboration with the Hebrew University). This research will investigate the possibility of conscious and non-conscious processing in intelligent animals. He completed a PhD in Behavioral Cognitive Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Daniel Algom in 2014.   Upon completion of his PhD, Moshe continued to study for a second PhD in Molecular Genetics under the supervision of Prof. Gideon Rechavi from Sheba Medical Center and Prof. Haim Cohen from Bar-Ilan University.

Moshe is also a recipient of the Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Recent publications include:

Ben-Haim MS, Chajut E, Hassin R, Algom D., Speeded naming or naming speed? The automatic effects of object speed on performance, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2015, 144(2), 326-338

Tamar Ben-Shaanan was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Molecular and functional characterization of the anterior cingulate cortex neurons regulating physical and emotional pain” at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. This research will apply new technologies to characterize the neuronal sub-populations in the anterior cingulate cortex underlying emotional and physical pain.  Her PhD research was conducted at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and revealed a connection between the brain’s reward circuitry, which is mostly associated with positive emotions and expectation, and immunity. This research was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Asya Rolls. Tamar aims to further investigate how mood-regulating neuronal circuits can affect immunity and physiology.

Recent publications include:

Ben-Shannan TL, Azulay-Debby H, Dubovik T, Starosvetsky E, Korin B, Schiller M, Green NL, Admon Y, Hakim F, Shen-Orr SS, Rolls A. Activation of the reward system boosts innate and adaptive immunity. Nature Medicine. 2016 Jul.

Eran Cohen Barak was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Understanding the cellular signaling impacted by genetic mutation in SHOC2 leading to heart defects, skin dysfunction and cancer” at Northwestern University, Chicago. The aim of this research is to discover pivotal processes in skin, heart and oncologic diseases through investigation of a rare genetic disease, as a model. Eran is a senior physician in the Dermatology department of “Emek" Medical Center, affiliated to the Technion- Israel Institution of Technology, where he received his MD. He is responsible for the hospitalization unit and the pediatric dermatology clinic and as part of his clinical activities, he treats patients with genetic diseases, which are prevalent in the "Emek" catchment area. Eran's vision is to establish an independent research program in "Emek", thus melting advanced clinical and research facilities.

Recent Publications:

Cohen Barak E and Ziv M..Impact of anti-psoriatic therapy on endothelial function. Br J Dermatol . 2015; 1440-6

 

Ilan Cohen was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Large-Scale Resource Allocation Optimization” at the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. This research will investigate how to significantly decrease the energy waste and monetary cost of large data centers. His Ph.D. research was conducted at the Tel Aviv University and focused on various aspects of online packing and covering problems. This research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Yossi Azar.

Recent publications include:

Azar, Y., Cohen, I., and Roytman, A. “Online Lower Bounds via Duality.” In Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms

Ohad Green was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Developing and implementing an online intervention to improve the quality of life of migrant home care workers and the older adults under their care” at the University of South Florida. In his PhD research, which was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Liat Ayalon, at Bar-Ilan University, he investigated the exposure of migrant home care workers to abuse and exploitation and their willingness to report victimization. For his dissertation, he won the Israeli Industrial Relation Research Association (IIRRA) award for scientific work. Ohad is also a social worker, and it is his ambition to combine research with clinical practice to benefit families of migrant workers and refugees.

Recent publications include:

Green, O., and Ayalon L. "Whom do migrant home care workers contact in the case of work-related abuse?". Journal of Interpersonal Violence 31 (2016): 3236-3256.
Ayalon, L., Lev, S., Green, O. and Nevo, U. (2016). "A systematic review and metaanalysis of interventions designed to prevent or stop elder maltreatment". Age and 45 (2016): 216-227

Yonatan Israel was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research titled: “Quantum microscopy”. The project will investigate the basic interaction of quantum states with biological systems and explore methods to improve our ability to observe these systems using microscopes. His PhD research was conducted at the Weizmann Institute of Science and focused on enhancing the sensitivity and resolution of optical microscopy using quantum optical principles. This research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Yaron Silberberg.

Recent publications include:

Y. Israel, R. Tenne, D. Oron, and Y. Silberberg, “Quantum correlations enhanced super-resolution localization microscopy enabled by a fibre bundle camera” Nature Communications 8 (2017)

Dr. Yael Lahav was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project entitled “The Implications of Secondary Traumatization on Perceived Health and Leukocyte Telomere Length among Combatants' Wives – Could there be somatic contagion?" at Stanford University. This research will investigate the implications of secondary traumatization on perceived health and telomere shortening, and the role of fusion-in-relationship, among combatants' spouses. Dr. Lahav's PhD research was conducted at Tel-Aviv University under the supervision of Prof. Zahava Solomon and focused on the long-lasting implications of war captivity regarding the physical and interpersonal realms. Upon completion of her PhD, Dr. Lahav continued as a postdoctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at the University of Southern Denmark, hosted by Prof. Elklit.

Dr. Lahav has already published 14 articles, one book chapter and currently is editing a book on PTSD treatment. She is also a clinical psychologist and aspires to continue to combine research with clinical practice.

Recent publications include:

Lahav, Y., Stein, C., & Solomon, Z. (2016). Keeping a healthy distance: Self-differentiation and perceived health among ex-POWs' wives. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 89, 61-68.

Shai Maayani was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Electrically-pumped gas-fiber lasers “ at the University of MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. This research will investigate the laser effect of internally–pump hollow fibers. His PhD research was conducted at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and focused on optically interrogation and control of capillary waves in a hybrid opto-capillary cavities. This research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Tal Carmon. Shai was employed in a detector company as an electro optics engineer prior to his PhD.

Recent publications include:

Maayani, S., Martin, L.L., and Carmon, T., "Optical Binding in White Light", Optics Letters, (2015). 40(8): p. 1818-1821.
Maayani, S., Martin, L.L., and Carmon, T., "Water-walled microfluidics for high-optical finesse cavities", Nature Communication, (2016). 7.
Maayani, S., Martin, L.L., Kaminski, S., and Carmon, T., "Cavity optocapillaries", Optica 3.5 (2016): 552-555.
Moore, J., Martin, L.L., Maayani, S., Kim, K.H., Chandrahalim, H., Eichenfield, M., Martin, I.R., & Carmon, T., "Regular oscillations and random motion of glass microspheres levitated by a single optical beam in air", Optics Express,2016. 24(3), 2850.
Kaminski, S., Martin, L.L., Maayani, S. & Carmon, T., "Ripplon Laser through stimulated emission mediated by water waves", Nature Photonics, 2016.

Sivan Pearl Mizrahi was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her tentative research titled “Exploring the role of sRNAs in phenotypic variability”. This project's propose is to quantify the dynamical properties of sRNAs regulating networks.  In her PhD research, carried out under the supervision of Prof. Nathalie Balaban and Prof. Itamar Simon, at  the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she investigated cell-cycle variability and its relation to the response to anti-cancer drugs, at the single cell level. Sivan continued as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Microbiology at the Hebrew University, hosted by Prof. Hanah Margalit.

Recent publications include:

Pearl-Mizrahi S, Gefen O, Simon I & Balaban NQ. "Persistence to Anti-Cancer Treatments in the Stationary to Proliferating Transition". Cell Cycle, 2016;15(24):3442-3453.

Sandler O*, Pearl-Mizrahi S*, Weiss N, Agam O, Simon I, Balaban NQ. "Lineage correlations of single cell division time as a probe of cell-cycle dynamics". Nature, 2015;519:468–471.  (*equal contribution).

Pearl S, Gabay C, Kishony R, Oppenheim A, Balaban NQ. "Non-genetic individuality in the host-phage interaction". PLoS Biology, 2008;6(5).

Roy Porat was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Reinterpreting Early Chinese Thought by Incorporating Sinological and Psycholinguistic Methods” at Harvard University. This project will investigate the role of language in the theory and praxis of early Chinese thought. He pursued two PhD researches, in Chinese Philosophy and Psycholinguistics, both at Tel Aviv University. The first, under the supervision of Prof. Galia Patt-Shamir, focused on the philosophy of the ancient Daoist thinker Zhuangzi, and the second, under the supervision of Prof. Yeshayahu Shen and Dr. David Gil, focused on the impact of language on metaphorical processing.

Roy is also a recipient of the Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Recent publications include:

Shen, Y., and Porat, R., "Metaphorical Directionality: The Role of Language," in B. Hampe (Ed.) Metaphor: Embodied Cognition & Discourse (forthcoming). Cambridge University Press

Porat, R., and Shen, Y., "Metaphor: The Journey from Bidirectionality to Unidirectionality." Poetics Today 38.2 (2017): 123-140

Porat, R., and Shen, Y., "Imposed Metaphoricity." Metaphor and Symbol 30.2 (2015): 1-18

Porat, R., "Layers of ineffability in the Zhuangzi," in L. Kohn (Ed.) New Visions of the Zhuangzi (2015): 119-136. Three Pines Press

Omri Ram was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “The transient flow field that develops and compliant boundary response following cavitation bubbles collapse” at Johns Hopkins University. This project will explore the formation of cavitation bubbles near surfaces, the forces that asserted during their collapse and the coupled fluid structure interaction that follows. In his PhD research, which was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Oren Sadot, at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, he investigated the interaction of shock waves with porous medium. In his PhD he developed new methodologies to predict the applicability of porous barriers as passive protection means.

Recent publications include:

O. Ram & O. Sadot. “Analysis of the pressure buildup behind rigid porous media impinged by shock waves in time and frequency domains”. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 779, 842-858, 2015.

Daniel Sharon was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled “Quantitative structure-function relationships in block copolymer electrolyte films” at the Institute of Molecular Engineering at Chicago University. This project will examine the relationships between the polymer electrolyte materials structure and its transport properties.  

In his PhD research, which was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Doron Aurbach at Bar-Ilan University, he investigated non-aqueous electrolyte solutions for lithium-oxygen batteries. His diagnostic work might help to optimize the electrolyte solutions selection process for future advance rechargeable batteries.

Recent publications include:

(1)        Sharon, D.; Hirshberg, D.; Afri, M.; Frimer, A. A.; Aurbach, D. The Importance of Solvent Selection in Li–O₂ Cells. Chem. Commun. 2017, 53 (22), 3269–3272.

(2)        Sharon, D.; Hirsberg, D.; Salama, M.; Afri, M.; Frimer, A. A.; Noked, M.; Kwak, W.-J.; Sun, Y.-K.; Aurbach, D. Mechanistic Role of Li⁺ Dissociation Level in Aprotic Li–O₂ Battery. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2016, 8 (8), 5300–5307.

Noam Solomon was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project titled “Algebraic methods in Combinatorial Geometry” at the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications at Harvard University. In his PhD research, which was carried out under the supervision of Professor Micha Sharir, in the Blavatnik school of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, he developed and applied tools from Algebra and Algebraic Geometry in the field of Incidence Geometry. An underlying  theme in his research is the study of extremal patterns that simple varieties in Euclidean spaces (e.g., lines in three, four and higher dimensions)  have between themselves. Already in  the case of lines, this problem has numerous applications in combinatorics, motion planning, robotics, range searching and algebraic complexity. Noam also holds a PhD in Mathematics from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and a three-year post-doctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science and Technology. 

Recent publications include:

Micha Sharir, Noam Solomon: Incidences Between Points and Lines in $${\mathbb {R}}^4$$. Discrete & Computational Geometry 57(3): 702-756 (2017)

Dana Sury was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project titled “Gestures as a window onto mathematical abilities at different stages of development" at the University of Chicago, Illinois. This research will investigate the relationship between gestures and mathematical abilities in different stages of development as an optional tool for predicting the developmental of mathematical skills. Her PhD research was conducted at the University of Haifa and focused on the neurocognitive mechanisms that stand in the heart of mathematical ability. Specifically, implicit ordinal processing. This research was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Orly Rubinstev. Dana is also a clinician specialized in diagnosis and therapy for children and adults who struggle with learning disabilities and, her ambition is to combine research with clinical practice.

Safa Aburabia was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project, titled:  "Between Israeli institutions and Bedouin tribalism: the struggle for land in the Negev among the third-generation to the Nakbah". The research analyzes recent social and conceptual changes in Bedouin Palestinian society through the prism of the struggle over land led by the Bedouin youth movement, Al-Hirak al-Shababi. Their struggle aims for both internal and external change in perceptions of the Bedouin and the social and cultural developments among the Bedouin society in the Negev. 

Safa received her PhD in Middle East studies from Ben Gurion University in Israel. Her PhD Dissertation focused on:" The Gendered Historical Discourse on the Nakba: the Perspective of Bedouin Arab Women in the Negev". This examines gender resistance spaces among Negev Bedouin Arab women. The thesis is based on ethnographic documentation of the memories of the Nakba generation and their daughters, derived from their life stories ranging from the past (before 1948) to the present.

Safa is the Director of the Leadership in the Arab and Bedouin Societies Program in the Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev, and lecturer at Ben Gurion University and Sapir College.

Her recent publications include: 2014, ‘De-colonizing Bedouin Arab discourse’, in: Naqab Bedouin and Colonialism: New Perspectives, Nasasra, M.& Ratcliffe, R.& Abu Rabia-Queder S.& Richter- Devroe, S. (eds.). Routledge.

Nana was awarded the Fulbright and Israel Institute Post-doctoral Fellowships to pursue her research project: “Belated Avant-garde: Toward a Genealogy of the Avant-garde in Hebrew Literature”, in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She focuses on attempts of cultural innovators to ignite change in the public sphere through aesthetic and rhetorical devices. Her project continues and extends her dissertation which explores the manifesto genre, specifically a corpus of Hebrew manifestos in the fields of art and literature and the diverse rhetorical mechanisms activated by their issuers. Nana served as a lecturer in the Department of Literature and in the Honors Program in the Humanities and Arts in Tel Aviv University. She specializes in literature and rhetoric in a broad cultural context, and also teaches applied rhetoric (public speaking) in academic as well as non-academic frameworks. 

Nana’s recent publications include:

Forthcoming book: Manifestos: Restless Writings on the Brink of the 21st Century (Critical Horizons, Bar Ilan University Press)

“Engagements multiples: la rhétorique du GlobalMay Manifesto” Argumentation et Analyse du Discours, (2015)

Karma Ben Johanan was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project, titled “Religious Mission in the Multicultural West: Jewish and Christian Perspectives,” at the Department of History, U.C. Berkeley. She conducted her doctoral studies at the Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies, Tel Aviv University, under the supervision of Prof. Aviad Kleinberg (Tel Aviv University), and Prof. Marc Shapiro (University of Scranton, Pennsylvania). Her dissertation, titled "Contemporary Conceptions of Judaism and Christianity in Catholic and Jewish Orthodox Theologies", focuses on Jewish-Christian relations as they were re-crystallized over the last decades in Europe, Israel and North America. She graduated from the Adi Lautman Program for Outstanding Students with an M.A degree summa cum laude in Comparative Religion, from the School of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University.

Karma's recent publications include:

Ben Johanan, Karma, "Wreaking Judgment on Mount Esau: Christianity in R. Kook's Thought", Jewish Quarterly Review 106 1(Winter 2016), pp. 76-100; Porat, Dina, Ben Johanan, Karma, and Braude, Ruth (eds.), In Our Time: Documents and Articles on the Catholic Church and the Jewish People in the Wake of the Shoah [Hebrew] (Tel Aviv University Press, Tel Aviv, 2015).

Assaf Ben-Moshe was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship to pursue his research, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Alivisatos at UC Berkeley. His project is titled:"Following unique formation and transformation pathways of inorganic nanocrystals". In this project, several approaches will be used to observe dynamical processes in the growth and transformation of inorganic nanocrystals. In some cases this will be followed by characterization of unique magnetic and optoelectronic properties that emerge from special crystalline structures, material compositions and shapes of these nanocrystals. In his PhD research in the group of Prof. Gil Markovich in Tel-Aviv University, he focused on natural and induced chirality in inorganic nanocrystals, and the associated physical and chemical properties.

Most recent publication:

Ben-Moshe, A. et al. "Enantioselective control of lattice and shape chirality in inorganic nanocrystals using chiral biomolecules" Nat. Commun. 5 (2014).

Avishai Benyamini’s post-doctoral research project is titled “realizing superfluidity in 1D and 2D systems” in Columbia University. The recent advances in growth and exfoliation of 2D materials led to the ability to construct new materials at will and by design. In these new materials it is now possible to realize known and even new physical phenomena. Creating superfluidity in a designed material will be a major breakthrough of broad impact.

Avishai received his MSc and PhD in Physics from the Weizmann Institute of Science. His PhD was done in the lab of Prof. Shahal Ilani where he developed a new technique for creating tunable interacting physical systems, based on carbon nanotubes, and realized in them physical phenomena as a tunable electron-phonon coupling and attraction between electrons.

Recent publications:

“Real-space tailoring of the electron-phonon coupling in ultraclean nanotube mechanical resonators”. Nature Physics 10 (2), 151-156, 2014. A. Benyamini, et. al.

"Electron Attraction Mediated by Coulomb Repulsion". To be published in Nature 2016. A. Hamo, A. Benyamini, et. al.

Liron Cohen was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her project titled "Constructive Ancestral Logic and its Applications" at Cornell University. The main goal of her research is to develop a unified framework for formalizing important set theories of different strength and to use this framework for formalizing mathematics in a way that reflects real mathematical practice. She also investigates computational aspects and applications of this framework, as well as its potential for mathematical knowledge management (MKM).

Publication:

       Liron Cohen and Robert L. Constable. Intuitionistic ancestral logic. Journal of Logic and Computation, 2015.     

Avner Ecker received a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellowship to pursue the project "Greek Culture in Judea: the Transition from Ptolemaic to Seleucid Rule" at Princeton University. The project aims to elucidate the administrative, linguistic and subsequent cultural shift in Judea under Hellenistic kings (ca. 200 BC) based on ostraca discovered in controlled excavations. By studying the Hellenistic period Avner is in fact extending back in time his PhD dissertation which dealt with the urbanization process of Roman Judea, where he traced the development of the polis in the region between the 1^st century BCE and the 4^th century.

Avner's recent publications include:

Ecker, A., "Homer in Herodium: Graffito of Il. 6.264," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, 183, 2012, pp. 15-20.

           B. Zissu and A. Ecker, "A Roman Military Fort North of Bet Guvrin/Eleutheropolis?" Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 188, 2014, pp. 293-312.

         "People and Gods in the Cities of Roman Palestine: a Preliminary Inquiry into the Popularity of Civic Cults," in: Z. Weiss and O. Tal (edd.): Expressions of Cult in the Southern Levant in the Greco-Roman Period.  Manifestations in Text and Material Culture, Contextualizing the Sacred 6, Turnhout, forthcoming.

Yoel Guzansky is currently a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University. Before joining INSS, he was director for strategic affairs at Israel's National Security Council in the Prime Minister's Office. He was responsible for preparing assessments and making policy recommendations for decision makers on the Iranian nuclear challenge. Over the years he has participated in training courses provided by the US Department of State, US Department of Energy, Israel Foreign Ministry and Israel Atomic Energy Commission. His present research focuses on Gulf security and Middle East strategic issues. He has published in academic and policy oriented venues such as Foreign Affairs, National Interest, Washington Quarterly, Survival, Middle East Journal, Middle Eastern Studies, Orbis, Middle East Policy, RUSI, Comparative Strategy, Mediterranean Politics, the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs and Harvard Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy.

The proposed project aims at providing an informed analysis on the question of civilian nuclear programs in the Middle East, by looking at the following themes:

a) Proliferation drivers/barriers which lead countries in the region to develop, or conversely to renounce civilian nuclear programs.

b) The motivations of Middle Eastern countries to develop functional nuclear programs and the role of U.S. non-proliferation policy – especially the effects of the Iran deal on nuclear decision making in the region.

The project will focus on the potential spread of nuclear power plants and related facilities to states that are new entrants to the "nuclear energy club": UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. It will also seek to identify trends which affect issues of latent proliferation and which make "breakout" towards a nuclear weapons capability likely in certain states.

Recent Books

The Arab World: On the Road to State Failure (with Kobi Michael), (2016).

The Arab Gulf States and Reform in the Middle East: Between Iran and the Arab Spring, (2015).

Yogev Kivity was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled "Mechanisms of Change in Transference Focused Psychotherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder: Therapist Interventions, Reflective Function and Self-Regulation" at Pennsylvania State University. His doctoral research was conducted in Prof. Jonathan D. Huppert's Laboratory for the Study and Treatment of Anxiety and focused on the role of emotion regulation in social anxiety disorder and in cognitive-behavioral therapy using behavioral, electrocortical and self-report measures.

Recent publication: 

 vKivity, Y. & Huppert, J.D. (2016). Does Cognitive Reappraisal Reduce Anxiety? A Daily Diary Study of a Micro-Intervention with Individuals with High Social Anxiety. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 84(3), 269-283.

Shlomo Mehari was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct a research, titled "Gallium Nitride based Transistors for High Efficiency Power Electronics," at Cornell University. Within this project, novel semiconductor devices for high voltage high current applications will be studied. Gallium nitride is poised to become the next semiconductor for power electronics, enabling much higher efficiency than silicon. The ultimate goal is saving of up to 10% electrical energy worldwide.

Shlomo received the BSc (2009) in Material Science and Engineering, the BSc (2009) in Physics, and the MSc (2012) in Electrical Engineering at the Technion−Israel Institute of Technology. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at the Technion. During his PhD, Shlomo invented a new method to probe a very important physical property of the interface between the semiconductor and an insulating layer, which plays a crucial role in device performance, called the electron density of states.

His recent publications include:

Shlomo Mehari, Yonatan Calahorra, Arkady Gavrilov, Moshe Eizenberg, and Dan Ritter, "Role of Transport During Transient Phenomena in AlGaN/GaN Heterostructure FETs," IEEE Electron Device Letters, vol. 36, no. 11, pp. 1124–1127, (Nov. 2015).

Yitzhak Reizel was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research titled "Hepatocyte-specific postnatal DNA demethylation: mechanism and liver regeneration" with Professor Klaus Kaestner at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reizel's dissertation at the Weizmann Institute of Science focused on stem cell dynamics using novel tool which reconstruct cell lineage trees from somatic mutations in microsatellite. This project was in collaboration with Professor Ehud Shapiro. After receiving his PhD, he moved to Prof. Howard Cedar’s laboratory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his first post-doctoral study, which focused on post-natal changes in DNA methylation. 

Recent publications include:

"Gender-specific postnatal demethylation and establishment of epigenetic memory." Genes and Development  (May 2015) 23-33.

Dorit Segal was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project, titled “The effect of Bilingualism on language, attention and thought,” at the University of California, San- Diego and at San-Diego University State. This research will investigate the effect of bilingualism on attention functions and linguistic control mechanisms. Her PhD research was conducted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and focused on linguistic, cognitive and behavioral aspects of ADHD. This research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Lilach Shalev- Mevorach and Prof. Nira Mashal. Dorit is also a speech therapist and her ambition is to combine research with clinical practice.

Dorit's recent publications include: Segal, D., Mashal, N., & Shalev, L. (2015). Semantic conflicts are resolved differently by adults with and without ADHD. Research in developmental disabilities, 47, 416-429. 

Oren Shlomo was awarded a Fulbright postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project, titled "Analysis of a New Spatial Regime in post-Oslo East Jerusalem" at the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. This project is situated within the study of contested cities and its objective is to investigate new forms of spatial strategies and planning policies in post-Oslo East Jerusalem and their relation to the shifting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from peace negotiations to conflict management. Oren conducted his PhD studies at the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University. His PhD research, supervised by Prof. Haim Yacobi and recently awarded best dissertation for the year 2015 by the Israeli Political Science Association, focused on processes of governmentalization and adaptation in post-Oslo East Jerusalem and their manifestation in new forms of governance and administration of Palestinian urban services and infrastructures. 

Oren's recent publications include:

2014, co-editor (with Tovi Fenster) of "Cities of Tomorrow: Planning, Justice and Sustainability Today?", (Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House;2014, 280 pages) (in Hebrew).  

Between discrimination and stabilization: The exceptional governmentalities of East Jerusalem. City. (2016) 20:3, 428-440

Sub-formality in the formalization of public transport in East Jerusalem. Current Sociology. (Forthcoming 2016.)

The Governmentalization of East Jerusalem in post-Oslo era.  Theory and Criticism (Hebrew). (Forthcoming 2017.)

Shlomo Oren.  Sub-Formalization in East Jerusalem schooling. Geography Research Forum. (Forthcoming)

Shay Solomon was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project, titled "Real-Life Networks: Sparse, Fault-Tolerant, and Dynamic", at Stanford University. This project will explore algorithms for various network problems, including dynamic matchings and topics related to graph compression.

Shay received his PhD in Computer Science from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His PhD research, which was carried out under the advice of Prof. Michael Elkin, investigated sparse representations for metric spaces. These representations should achieve multiple contradictory properties, such as degree, weight and diameter, simultaneously.

Upon completion of his PhD, Shay continued as a postdoc fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, hosted by Prof. David Peleg, and later as a postdoc fellow in the Computer Science Department at Tel Aviv University, hosted by Prof. Haim Kaplan and Prof. Micha Sharir.

Shay is also a recipient of the Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship.

His recent publications include: M. Elkin and S. Solomon. "Optimal Euclidean Spanners: Really Short, Thin and Lanky." Journal of the ACM, 62(5): 35, (2015).

Ilya Soloveychik was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research at Harvard University. His recent awards include the Feder Family Prize for outstanding research work in the field of Communications Technology in 2015 and the Thalheimer Scholarship from Wolf Foundation in 2016. Ilya's research mainly focuses on the development of novel statistical tools for high-dimensional and robust data processing, and in particular on efficient robust covariance estimation techniques which are ubiquitous in almost all modern Big Data applications. Ilya is going to join the Signal Processing research group of Prof. Vahid Tarokh at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences targeting challenging problems in Random Matrix Theory and related areas. He completed his Ph.D. dissertation in Electrical Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Among his recent publications is the article "Group Symmetric Robust Covariance Estimation" by I.S., D. Trushin and A. Wiesel at IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 64, n. 1, pp. 244-257, (2016).

Leeat Yankielowicz-Keren was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to study the tumor-immune microenvironment in breast cancer using a multiplexed imaging platform at Stanford University. This project aims to advance the understanding of early-stages breast cancer by simultaneous imaging of dozens of proteins at sub-cellular resolution within a tissue section and to discover features that predict progression to invasive disease. Leeat received her BSc in Life Sciences in the `Honorary research track for excellent students` at Tel-Aviv University. She continued to an MSc and PhD in Life Sciences at the Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Prof. Eran Segal and Prof. Ron Milo and studied the effects of gene expression levels on cellular fitness. She is also the recipient of the Rothschild Postdoctoral Fellowship and a mother of two adorable boys.

Leeat's publications include: Keren et al.,"Promoters maintain their relative activity levels under different growth conditions." Molecular Systems Biology 9, 701 (2013).

Dor Amram was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project in Materials Science & Engineering.

Dor received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from the Technion.

Mor Ben-Tov (Kuperberg) was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project in Neuroscience.

Mor received her Bsc and MSc in Biomedical Engineering, as well as her PhD in Life Sciences from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Noga Cohen was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project on Affective Neuroscience.

Noga received her BSc in Psychology & Biology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her MA in Clinical Psychology and PhD in Cognitive Pyschology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Lea David was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project in Anthropology.

Lea receivd her BA in Sociology & Anthropology and her MA in History from the University of Haifa, before completing her PhD in Sociology & Anthropology at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Gili Golan Polak was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Combinational Group Theory in Mathematics.

Gili received a BSc in Applied Mathematics and a MSc and a PhD in Mathematics from Bar-Ilan University. 

Yair Hartman was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project in Mathematics.

Yair received his BSc in Computer Science & Mathematics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem as well as his MSc in Mathematics. He obtained his PhD in Mathematics from the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Anatoly Khina was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Information Theory, Control Theory and Signal Processing.

Anatoly received his BSc, MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Tel Aviv University. 

Ariel Malinsky-Buller was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Prehistoric Archaeology.

Ariel received his BA in Archaeology & History and his MA and PhD in Archaeology from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. 

Michael Moshe was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project in Physics.

Michael received his BSc in Physics & Mathematics, as well as his MSc and PhD in Physics from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Orli Oren-Kolbinger was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project on Econometrics, Tax Law, Regulation and Public Finance.

Orli received her LLB and BA in Economics and Law at the University of Haifa and her PhD in Law and Economics from Bar-Ilan University. 

Merav Parter was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project on Theoretical Computer Science.

Merav received her BSc in Bioinformatics at Bar-Ilan University and her MSc in Bioinformatics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She completed her PhD in Computer Science & Applied Math at Weizmann as well.

Shai Pilosof was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Computational Ecology, Data science and Complex systems research.

Shai received his BSc in Life Sciences at Tel Aviv University and his MSc and PhD in Ecology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Sivan Refaely-Abramson was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project on Materials Science.

Sivan received her BSc in Chemistry & Physics at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her MSc and PhD in Chemistry at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue her research project on Settler Colonial Studies, Sociological History and Israel/Palestine Studies.

Areej received her BA, MA and PhD in Sociology & Anthropology at Tel Aviv University.

Idan Sherer was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Military History.

Idan received his BA in History & Political Science and MA in History from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and his PhD in History from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Noam Weinbach was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Eating Behaviors and Disorders, Body Image and Experimental Psychopathology.

Noam received his BA in Behavioral Sciences, his MA in Clinical Psychology and his PhD in Cognitive Neuropsychology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

Lior Zalmanson was awarded a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue his research project on Technology Management & Information Systems.

Lior has an MSc and PhD in Business from Tel Aviv University.