Announcements

In November 2019, 318 submissions were received in BSF’s Regular Grants Program, including 37 applications for Start-Up grants. A total of 82 grants were approved (25.8% success rate), including 13 Start-Up grants for newly appointed researchers (35% success rate).

Four-year grants received an average of $285,000, much higher than in previous years.

Grants for experimental studies in which there was an equal distribution between American and Israeli researchers received a total of $ 320,000.

The list of grants can be seen here.

The US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) is delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Anton F. Post as its new Executive Director, starting October 2020. He will replace the retiring Dr. Yair Rotstein, who has led the BSF for the past 16 years and whose contributions to the Foundation included the highly successful joint funding programs with the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Prof. Post currently serves as the Associate Vice President for Global Partnerships at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Previously, he was the Executive Director of FAU’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and of the Coastal Resources Center at the University of Rhode Island. From 2012-2015, he served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation where he was instrumental in establishing the NSF-BSF partnership in Ocean Sciences.

Prof. Post holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology, an MSc in Microbial Ecology, and a BSc degree in Biology from the University of Amsterdam. He started his 20-year academic career at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a postdoc in 1987, later earning a faculty appointment in Marine Sciences and advancing to the rank of Full Professor. During this time, he pioneered the field of molecular ecology, straddling the disciplines of the Life Sciences, Biogeochemistry, and Marine Microbiology.  He took on leadership roles as a member of the Board of Directors of the Eilat Marine Laboratory and as Director of the Moshe Shilo Minerva Center for Marine Biogeochemistry.

Prof. Post is well-published, with over 120 peer-reviewed publications, and he has been the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including being named visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earning the Gruss-Lipper Fellowship at the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. In leadership positions at U.S. state universities, he oversaw multi-million-dollar budgets, comprised mainly of competitively awarded research grants.

Prof. Post is married to Osnat Post-Arnan, and they have three children and three grandchildren. With this new chapter they will resume residence in their home in Jerusalem.

The BSF has published a new CALL FOR PROPOSAL for NSF-BSF applications related to the COVID-19 virus. The CALL can be found here.

We understand that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, delays in our supported projects may be inevitable. On the other hand, please note that because payments and annual grant renewals by the BSF are subject to submission of scientific and financial reports, delayed reporting by the grantee and/or his/her research office, will necessarily result in delayed payments. Consequently, and after communicating with some of our grantees, we will not postpone all deadlines universally as originally planned, but rather on an individual basis. Understanding the importance of uninterrupted funding, the Foundation will continue to process reports as they arrive, and pay accordingly with minimum delay, and with unused funds being carried over to the next research year. All COVID-19 related requests for extensions will be approved this year, and a no cost extension at the end of the project is often available as well.

The BSF understands that due to COVID-19, study trips in the Prof. Rahamimoff Travel Grants program have to be postponed. Therefore, the time period to make the trip has been extended from 12 to 15 months. If longer extensions are required, they will be treated on an individual basis.

Due to the current situation, the May 7th deadline for submissions of new applications to the Travel Grant Program for Young Researchers is now postponed until further notice.

12 PhD students from Israel and USA have been awarded  BSF Travel Grants in the framework

of the 2nd round of Prof. Rahamimoff Memorial Program for Young Scientists for 2019.

You can see a full list of grantees here.

The submission deadline for the next  round of this program is due May 5, 2020.

We would like to thank Prof. Keith Dienes, from the physics division at NSF, for his very informative talk about the NSF-BSF program.

His presentation can be downloaded here.

The present Executive Director, Dr. Yair Rotstein, will be retiring in 2020 from the BSF after 16 years. The BSF Board has formed a search committee, which published the following invitation for suitable candidates to apply for the position, with the Oct. 2, 2019 deadline:

A PDF version is available here.

The Instructions and Related BSF Regulations for Online Submission of Applications for the 2019 BSF Research Grants Program (Regular) have been updated and are now available on the website.

The Submission deadline is Nov. 20, 2019. To download the documents, and read about the program click here.

The BSF Website will be open for online submissions starting September 1, 2019.

We are happy to inform you that BSF and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are expanding their cooperation to include three additional program areas – Mathematical, Astronomical, and Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences – making Israel the NSF’s most active international partner. It is now possible to submit to the NSF joint applications by U.S. and Israeli scientists also in these disciplines, effective immediately. These latest agreements are in addition to the 12 NSF division programs and three interdivisional programs (two of which involve the NIH as well) that already jointly fund the wide spectrum of scientific research between the two countries.

105 BSF Research Grants have been recently awarded in the BSF’s 2018 Regular Research Grants Program.

12 PhD students from Israel and USA were recently awarded  BSF Travel Grants in the framework

of the 1st round of Prof. Rahamimoff Memorial Program for Young Scientists for 2019.

You can see a full list of grantees here.

The submission deadline for the 2nd round of this program is Nov. 7, 2019.

The BSF Board of Directors have decided that a 25% cap on the success rates will be applied to the Regular Research Grants program, starting with the 2017 applications.

It is likely to reduce the number of grants in the regular program, particularly in the Exact and Physical Sciences years, in which there are areas of research that enjoyed very high success rates.

The Israeli Council of Higher Education has included support for the joint funding programs of Israel with the NSF in its new multiyear funding program. The support for the NSF-BSF programs will be about 190 m shekels, spread over the next five years. This is secured, stable funding for the NSF-BSF cooperation, but is not enough presently to support all the active programs. As a result, all the programs in Social Sciences have been suspended.