April 16, 2007

San Francisco — The Machiah Foundation, a supporting foundation of the Jewish Community Endowment Fund, today announced the names of the eight recipients of the 2007 fellowship awards to support advanced life science research training for Israeli post-doctoral scientists to study at leading U.S. educational institutions. The Foundation initiated this program in response to the decreased training opportunities available to Israeli post-doctoral scientists at European institutions of higher learning in the last five years.  Fellowship recipients, who are selected by a distinguished group of senior U.S. scientists, will each receive $100,000 of stipend support, awarded over a two-year period.

The recipients, research projects, and their host institutions in the U.S. are:

• Izhack Cherny, Tel Aviv University
  Princeton University — Functional Proteins from Libraries of De Novo Sequences
• Sharon Etzion, Ben Gurion University
  Washington University School of Medicine (St. Louis) — Differential roles of Akt1, Akt2 and Trb3 in Cardiac Biology
• Roi Gazit, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Harvard School of Public Health — XBP-1 in Dendritic Cells
• Ayelet Gonen, Tel Aviv University
  University of California, San Diego — Development of a Vaccine to Prevent Atherosclerosis
• Tal Imbar, Hadassah University Hospital
  University Of California, San Francisco — Microarray Analysis of the First Human Trophoblast Stem Cell Line
• Tomer Kalisky, Weizmann Institute
  Stanford University, Bioengineering Department — Noise and Evolution in Biological Networks
• Ayelet Lamm, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
  Stanford University School of Medicine — Genomic Imprinting and Epigenetic Modifications in C. Elegans
• Erez Levanon, Tel Aviv University
  Harvard Medical School — The role of A-to-I RNA Editing in the Development of Primates

All fellows are citizen residents of the state of Israel and have agreed to return to and reside in the state of Israel for no less than three years after the fellowship award period has concluded. Additionally, applicants must have not previously studied in the United States or Canada for a period of six or more months.

In June 2005, the Machiah Foundation board approved a grant to begin and sustain this fellowship program. Subsequently, additional donors have provided funds through the Jewish Community Endowment Fund to expand the number of fellowship awards.  The 2007 cohort will receive research training funds from the Pinchas Aaron Sunshine Philanthropic Fund, the Gerson and Barbara Bakar Philanthropic Fund, and the Royce Philanthropic Fund, as well as the Bernard Osher Jewish Philanthropies Foundation, the Feldman Family Foundation, the Alexander M. and June L. Maisin Foundation, the Kanbar Charitable Trust, the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, the Koret Foundation and the Machiah Foundation.

Machiah Foundation board president Dr. Stanley N. Cohen, Professor of Genetics at Stanford University, indicated that, “the 2007 fellows were chosen from a group of 49 absolutely outstanding applicants.”  He stated that he hopes that these fellowship awards will, “help to advance the progress of science not only in Israel, but also more broadly. The global scientific community and individual fields of study in the biological and medical sciences will benefit from increased interactions with excellent Israeli researchers, and the state of Israel’s scientific research will be strengthened as fellows return to live and work in Israel.”

For more information, please contact Laura Mason, Program Officer at 415.512.6273 or
lauram@sfjcf.org.