Prof. Ruth Arnon, president of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, on
Sunday urged outstanding doctoral students in the sciences to return to Israel
after their post-doctoral work abroad and give back to the country what they
received.
She spoke at the Adams Fellowship award ceremony held in
Jerusalem about the toll of the brain drain.
The ceremony was attended by
the nine new fellows and some 70 who had been winners since 2005. So far, none
of the scholars who reached beyond the stage of post-doctorates has remained at
prestigious universities abroad such as Harvard and MIT; all have returned home,
even though they do not have to sign such a commitment to receive the
fellowship.
The nine doctoral students – who are doing work in structural
biology, molecular genetics, semiconductor nanoparticles, engineering and
computer science, mathematics, communications networks, chemistry, quantum field
theory and nanowires – will receive some $100,000 each for tuition and to see
them through their studies.
Some of them have already received
commitments to hire them as university lecturers even before getting their
PhDs.
Present at the ceremony was real estate entrepreneur Marcel Adams
of Montreal who will celebrate his 92nd birthday next month. A Holocaust
survivor and fighter in the War of Independence, Adams has always been grateful
to the state and comes to Jerusalem from Canada to hand the fellowships out
personally. With this years selection, the Hebrew University’s
Prof. Chaim Cedar, himself the recipient of the Israel Prize, Wolf Prize
and many other prestigious awards for his work in cancer and developmental
biology, concluded five years of being part of the Adams Fellowship steering and
selection committee.
The event included a lecture on nanoparticles going
back to the ancient Egyptian and Roman eras to the present, which was delivered
by Prof. Reshef Tenne of the Weizmann Institute of Science.