The Lowy School Gives $750K to New Global Projects at TAU

The Lowy International School is awarding approximately $750,000 in funding to more than a dozen new international-facing projects across faculties at Tel Aviv University (TAU). This investment in international collaboration is one of the first new initiatives arising from the recent significant donation made to TAU’s international school by Sir Frank Lowy.

While this is the first time the call for proposals was issued across campus, The Lowy International School aims to make the international project competition an annual one. The competition objective is to create long-term impact in the realm of internationalization, with a focus on fostering research partnerships, increasing international students on campus and creating more global opportunities in general for TAU students.

“The Lowy International School is really focused these days on supporting international programming and initiatives that benefit all of TAU’s academic community,” says Maureen Adiri Meyer, the director of The Lowy International School. “It’s a really exciting time for us and these new projects are just the beginning.”

The Project Winners

Faculty of Arts

Project: Curating Theater Histories, a Joint Research Program with the University of Cologne

Proposed by the Department of Theater Arts, this new program with the School of Theater and Media Culture at the University of Cologne is focused on developing methodologies for researching, comparing, connecting, representing and curating theater histories. The program will begin with an international workshop for graduate students at TAU anchored in the notion of the “dreaming apparatus,” and will focus on conducting archival work on theater productions related to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

Faculty of Engineering

Project: Engineering Ties Between TAU and Korea

Proposed by the Iby and Aladar Fleischman Faculty of Engineering, this project recognizes the strength of Korean universities in engineering disciplines and proposes a multi-pronged strategy for encouraging new engineering partnerships between TAU and Korean universities. This includes a multi-institutional visit to Korea; welcoming prospective Korean PhD students or post-doctoral fellows to TAU; holding a joint workshop with a Korean university; and funding TAU engineering students who wish to study short-term or research in Korea.

Faculty of Exact Sciences

Project: Establishing Vicarious Calibration Sites for Remote Sensing from Space 

Proposed by the geography department at the Porter School of Environment and Earth Sciences, this project supports hyperspectral remote sensing (HSR), a new technology that allows high-resolution sensing from space of the earth’s surface and atmosphere. As these sensors eventually degrade in performance, they need to be monitored from vicarious calibration (VC) sites: stable locations on Earth that can be used as reference points to calibrate the remote sensing data. Very few ideal VC sites exist; the goal is to collaborate with leading international space agencies to establish two of these VC sites in southern Israel.

Project: New Software Engineering Summer School with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)

Proposed by the School of Computer Science, this new international summer school held jointly with CMU will offer approximately 20 spots made up of: senior researchers from the organizer schools and abroad, graduate students from TAU and CMU, and graduate students from other universities abroad.  The focus of the school will be on formal specifications and analysis – a critical and rigorous process that enables software engineers to become more precise about the systems they build. 

 Faculty of Humanities

Project: New Partnership with the School of History at the University of Leeds

This project builds off initial discussions between TAU’s Zvi Yavetz School of Historical Studies and the School of History at the University of Leeds on establishing new joint and/or double degrees, providing cost-effective exchanges for PhD students, offering joint courses and working on joint projects. Next steps towards these goals will be reciprocal visiting delegations, fundraising activities, hosting researchers at each respective university, supporting an exchange mission, and hosting a joint summer research workshop for faculty and students. 

Project: New International Research Project on Wor(l)d Literature, the Planet and Peoples

Proposed by the comparative literature program in TAU’s School of Cultural Studies, this research project for international postgraduates will focus on tracking gender representation, translation studies, critical philology and notions of decolonization across diverse linguistic and literary traditions. The project will build off of existing relationships with respective departments at universities in Europe (e.g., the Free University of Berlin, the University of Bern) and in the United States (e.g., Stanford, Yale, Chicago).

Faculty of Law

Project: Increasing and Renewing Collaboration with UC Berkeley School of Law

Proposed by the Buchmann Faculty of Law, this project builds on a long-standing relationship between TAU and Berkeley’s law faculties and aims to strengthen ties in several ways. This includes refreshing the joint executive LLM program offered between the two universities and tailoring it to current challenges facing business and technology lawyers worldwide. Additionally, the two institutions will work together on new research, a conference and the creation of new joint courses – for instance, on responsibility, accountability, ethics and transparency in relation to artificial intelligence. 

Faculty of Life Sciences

Project: International Workshop on Animal Behavior and Ecology in Light of Global Changes

Proposed by the School of Zoology, the workshop will bring together 15 Israeli and 15 international PhD and graduate students for an annual hands-on two-week workshop focused on how animals and ecology adapt to physical, ecological and social constraints, as well as the impacts of climate change on the natural world in extreme environments. The workshop locations will alternate between Eilat’s coral reef and the Arava desert.

 Faculty of Medicine

Project: A New Approach to International PhD Student Recruitment

Proposed by the Faculty of Medicine, this new innovative project provides short-term funding for prospective PhD candidates to spend a few months with the faculty on a trial basis. The approach resolves a broader obstacle often faced in international PhD recruitment, as foreign graduate students can be reserved about moving to a new country, while principal investigators can have reservations about supervising a student whom they have never met.

Project: Bringing the International Student Program in Research Experience (InSPIRE) to TAU

Proposed by the School of Medicine, this project will bring an international program spearheaded by the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), Australia’s leading independent medical research institute, to TAU. By participating in the program, TAU medical students will have the opportunity to be hosted by WEHI or a partner medical research institute in Melbourne for a fully funded 10-week internship. 

Faculty of Social Sciences

Project: New Collaboration with the London School of Economics (LSE)

Proposed by the Eitan Berglas School of Economics, this project will establish a new partnership with LSE’s Centre for Macroeconomics, one of the leading macroeconomics groups in the world. This new cooperation will revolve around the creation of graduate and post-doctoral exchange opportunities; mutual faculty visits for research purposes; guest professors from LSE who will teach mini graduate courses on economics at TAU; and, potentially, a joint summer workshop in macroeconomics. 

Project: Recovery from Behavioral Additions: International Course and Research Group

Proposed by the Bob Shapell School of Social Work, the behavioral addiction project will foster an international research network in the field of addiction studies. The project will revolve around a new one-week intensive course in the winter of 2024, which will be open to seven researchers from TAU and seven researchers from international universities. The course will partly be run with the aim of producing new joint publications and, eventually, a new interdisciplinary and international center at TAU for the study of recovery from addictions.

School of Neuroscience

Project: Columbia-TAU collaboration in Neuroscience

Proposed by the Sagol School of Neuroscience, this project establishes a long-term scientific collaboration with the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. As part of the collaboration, three students from each university will receive two months of research training at the partner institution, and a joint alternating annual symposium will be established. To support the project, TAU’s funding will be matched by Columbia university.