Seventy BGU researchers have been awarded personal grants for 2012 from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF,) including eight “New Researchers” who received substantial grants to equip their laboratories.
The ISF, established by the Israel National Academy of Sciences, is Israel's major source of competitive grants, funding basic research to researchers at Israeli universities, other institutions of higher education, research and medical centers. The grants were awarded to individual researchers in BGU's faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences, Health Sciences and Engineering Sciences.
While staff members from all the Faculties/Institutes received grants the success rates for the Faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences, and of Natural Sciences were particularly high.
In addition to personal grants, the ISF awarded several special team grants, including one to Prof. Avishai Henik, Prof. Joseph Tzelgov and Prof. Andrea Berger of the Dept. of Psychology, along with their Haifa University colleague Dr. Orly Rubinsten, to continue support of the Center for the Neurocognitive Basis of Numerical Cognition (CNBNC). The center was established four years ago within the ISF Centers for Excellence program, in order to study the neurocognitive basis of numerical cognition.
Two major ISF grants for institutional facilities were awarded to BGU researchers: a State-of-the-Art Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) Laboratory for the Materials Engineering Dept. and an Environmental Isotopes Laboratory to study the fate of organic compounds in aquatic systems for the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research.
The ISF's Klein Prize for Outstanding Cancer Research was awarded to Prof. Angel Porgador and Drs. Eitan Rubin of the Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology and Immunology and Eyal Sheiner of Soroka Medical Center. The prize is named for Prof. Georg and Eva Klein, prominent cancer researchers at the famous Karolinska Institute in Sweden, who established an endowment for an annual prize in Israel.
