Tel Aviv University to Research ‘Digital Living’ With Stanford University, UC-Berkeley
by Algemeiner Staff
Tel Aviv University (TAU) announced the launch of a collaborative initiative with the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University last week, which will focus on multidisciplinary research in medical and information technology.
A five-year, $10 million grant by the San Francisco-based Koret Foundation will fund the initiative, which seeks to bring together leading scholars from TAU, UC Berkeley, and Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering.
“We welcome these faculty research relationships,” said Prof. Joseph Klafter, president of Tel Aviv University, who signed a memorandum of understanding with UC Berkeley Chancellor Prof. Carol Tecla Christ and Stanford University Dean of Engineering Prof. Jennifer Widom earlier this week.
A program for bioinformatics and computational biology will be jointly run by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Bioinformatics at TAU and the Center of Computational Biology at Berkeley. It will award joint research grants to groups at both institutions, hold annual joint workshops and seminars, operate a visiting-scientist program, and facilitate a joint summer research program.
A second program for smart cities and digital living will fund joint research at TAU and Stanford. Grants will be awarded “to promising big data projects,” and an annual industry-oriented conference will “help match industry needs to academic research,” the Koret Foundation and TAU said in a joint press release.
“We are tremendously excited to support research collaboration between leading faculty that will have practical implications for all of us around the world,” said Dr. Anita Friedman, president of the Koret Foundation. “We look forward to seeing what the pioneers of these fields from Israel and the United States can do together.”