The University announced this year's recipients of the Bronfman Brandeis-Israel Research Collaboration funding. The five projects are intended to encourage joint projects between Brandeis faculty and faculty at Israeli universities.

According to a Feb. 6, 2012 BrandeisNOW article, the Brandeis-Israel Collaborative Research Initiative was made possible by funding to the University from Bronfman Philanthropies. As stated on the Bronfman Philanthropies website, the organization is "a family of charitable foundations operating in Canada, Israel, and the United States. [Its] mission is to encourage young people to strengthen their knowledge of their heritage, history and culture, as well as support programs to improve the quality of life in Israel."

Awards cover research costs for the initial stage of projects and travel funds to allow meetings of the research teams, according to an April 29 BrandeisNOW article.

The first project that was awarded funding is a collaboration between Prof. Dan Perlman (BIOL) and the dean of the Division of Continuing Education and External Studies at the Technion in Haifa, Israel. Perlman and Yehudit Judy Dori, a professor at the Technion, will study long-term retention among students in higher education and core science learning, according to the BrandeisNOW article.

According to Perlman, the two will work together at Brandeis. "We will be surveying and interviewing students of the past 20+ years who had deeply intensive educational experiences, along with a matched group of college students from the same schools who did not have similar experiences," he wrote in an email to the Justice.

The second project that was awarded funding is a collaboration between three members of the Brandeis faculty-including Prof. Daniel Kryder (POL), Prof. Susan S. Lanser (ENG) and Director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life and director of the Brandeis Al-Quds Partnership Daniel Terris-and three members of the faculty and administration at Al-Quds University, a Palestinian institution in the West Bank. The team plans to research the kinds of curricular and pedagogical frameworks that are most effective at fostering civic engagement in developing democratic societies.

According to Terris, the project will build on an existing collaboration between the two universities of over 10 years. This project in particular will "strengthen scholarship and teaching at both institutions" and "develop some publishable research related to democratic engagement," Terris wrote in an email to the Justice. The team will communicate both online as well as during a 10-day in-person visit to Al-Quds.

Terris commented on the value of such a collaboration. "The Brandeis/Al-Quds partnership has been important in introducing many members of the Brandeis community to Palestinian counterparts who are eager to work together on issues of mutual interest and benefit. This includes thinking about large issues of peace and justice, but it also means simply working together across divides on questions of scholarship, teaching, and academic excellence," he wrote.

The third funded project is a collaboration between the Rose Art Museum and the Israel Museum to develop the first phase in a series of three exhibitions during 2014 and 2015 to be featured at both museums. Brandeis participants will be Christopher Bedford, the Henry and Lois Foster director of the Rose, and Gannit Ankori, chair in Israeli art in the Department of Fine Arts and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies.

According to Bedford, the research will focus on new video art from Israel.

"This unmediated experience in Israel is intended to insure that the work we bring to the Rose and present to our audience is not simply reflective of those artists exported to the U.S. by commercial galleries and biennial structures, but by work identified by the curators as making significant contributions to the contemporary art worlds in Israel today," he wrote in an email to the Justice.

Bedford wrote that the team will visit artists' studios, galleries and museums to choose the most significant works.

Gannit said he hopes that this collaboration remains as a long-term collaboration, and that the project will enhance the Rose's global reach. "The Israel Museum is a world-renowned encyclopedic museum with an incredible collection. The Rose is much smaller and is known mainly in the greater Boston area for its unparalleled, but more focused collection of modern and contemporary art," he wrote in an email to the Justice.

The fourth project is a study of ongoing reforms to Israel's mental health system involving the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute, a center for applied research on social policy and services in Israel, and faculty of the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, including Prof. Dominic Hodgkin (Heller), associate dean for research Prof. Constance M. Horgan (Heller) and Prof. Stuart Altman (Heller).

According to Hodgkin, new reforms in Israel hold private health plans responsible for managing and delivering mental health services, instead of the government, which had previously been responsible. "The change has some parallels to recent experiences in the US mental health system, so there's room for Americans and Israelis to learn from each other," he wrote in an email to the Justice.

Hodgkin explained that the team will hold monthly video conference calls, that two members of the Israeli team will visit Boston to meet with the participants at Brandeis and that several of the Brandeis participants will visit Jerusalem to meet with the Israeli researchers, in addition to government officials.

"The project itself is quite small, but it could lead to spinoff work involving other Brandeis researchers around health policy issues," wrote Hodgkin. "Those could create opportunities for students to get involved. Also, our teaching will be able to use more examples from Israel."

The final recipient of funding is a collaboration between Prof. Wendy Cadge (SOC) and Associate Professor of Sociology Michal Pagis of Bar Ilan University to investigate the diffusion of religious practices into secular medical spheres in Israel.

A committee worked together to decide the winners of the funding from Bronfman Philanthropies.

"We received more than twice as many applications as we did last year, and could easily have funded several additional outstanding projects if we had more resources," said committee chair Irving Epstein, who is senior adviser to the provost for research and the Henry F. Fischbach Professor of Chemistry, to BrandeisNOW. "The program clearly addresses an important need, and we are grateful to the Bronfman Philanthropies for supporting it."
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