Two new Minerva Centers founded in 2021
In 2019 issued a Call for Proposals to establish new Minerva Centers in relation to the topic "Intelligence". It is only now that the Minerva Stiftung can announce two successful applications out of a whole variety of competitors: The Minerva Center for Human Intelligence in immersive, augmented and mixed Realities will be established at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will host the Minerva Center on Cell Intelligence.
Both starting this fall the Minerva Centers will be funded with a budget up to € 150k annually each for the next six years.
Minerva Center for Human Intelligence in immersive, augmented and mixed Realities
At Tel Aviv University Prof. Galit Yovel and Prof. Tom Schonberg will lead the Center's research with a main objective to bridge the gap between traditional laboratory research of human intelligence and the actual phenomena associated with intelligence as they are manifested in real-life. By using cutting-edge technologies including virtual, augmented and mixed realities the Centers aims to accumulate knowledge on different faculties of human intelligence – with an interdisciplinary approach from vision, motor imagery, person recognition, consciousness, decision-making, social intelligence and creativity.
"This is a really important and exciting initiative"
- Prof. Peter Dayan, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Together with the co-directors a steering committee of researcher from Tel Aviv University will head the Center: Prof. Roy Mukamel, Prof. Liad Mudrik and Dr. Yaara Yeshurun. Close Israeli partners will be Prof. Simon Shamay Tsoory (Haifa University), Dr.Michal Ramot (Weizmann Institute of Science), Dr. Elana Zion Golumbic (Bar-Ilan University), Dr. Roy Salomon (Bar-Ilan University), Dr. Yoni Pertzov (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Prof. Rafi Malach (Weizmann Institute of Science). Anticipated collaboration and joint activities with German partners will supposed to be carried out by Dr. Melissa Le-Hoa Võ (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt), Prof. David Poeppel (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt), Prof. Peter Dayan (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen) and Prof. Stefan Debener (Oldenburg University).
Minerva Center on Cell Intelligence
Cell intelligence is what Center's Director Prof. Eilon Sherman will focus their research on: the Center aims to gain a fundamental understanding of cell decision-making through whole-cell metamodeling across disciplines and scales by relying on the pioneering framework of Bayesian metamodeling. This will be conducted highly interdisciplinary with cell imaging, immunology, signaling, biophysics, integrative structural biology, mathematical modeling, and statistical machine learning.
Israeli researchers at the Center will be Prof. Eilon Sherman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr. Barak Raveh (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr. Dina Schneidman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Prof. Nir Friedman (Weizmann Institute of Science).
"I am enthusiastic about the center, which brings together many of the strengths of our university in cell biology, computational biology, biophysics, data science, statistical modeling, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. I anticipate major scientific breakthroughs from this unique interdisciplinary center, and meaningful strengthening of scientific relations between leading German and Israeli experts, young scientists, and institutions."
– Prof. Re'em Sari, Vice President for Research & Development, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The center will be overseen and supervised by a committee made up of the German researchers.
The committee chair will be Prof. Jana Wolf (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine). Further committee members will include: Prof. Jana Wolf (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine), Prof. Marcus Taylor (Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology) and Prof. Martin Beck (Max Planck Institute of Biophysics).
About the Minerva Centers' Programme
Minerva Centers are scientific pioneer institutions with a focus on innovative research topics in Israel and are funded by the Minerva Stiftung, the German Federal Ministery of Education and Research and the particular Israeli host university where the Center is based. The research at all 24 Minerva Centers is carried out in cooperation with German partners.
