BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY | THE WAY FORWARD

DONOR IMPACT ON RESEARCH EXCELLENCE

Building research capacity and capabilities is critical to BGU’s efforts to achieve its goal of becoming one of the world’s top research institutions and Israel’s leading university in terms of research, teaching, and contribution to society. It is also integral to fulfilling our strategy for achieving that goal. Each action that promotes a culture of research excellence dramatically improves BGU’s ability to become a talent magnet, capable of attracting the most promising faculty members, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers. The red flags signifying the need for change at BGU were research-related: declining research outputs, international rankings, and external research funding, and great effort has been made to reverse these trends. These efforts are fueled by donors, whose support has enabled BGU to recruit outstanding new faculty members, equip their labs with state-of-the-art equipment, and provide the research infrastructure and resources they need to advance in their fields and thrive. The research performed at BGU is remarkably diverse, with a topic of interest for every potential donor. In addition to supporting individual research projects, research centers, equipment, and recruitment, through their support of the Way Forward Campaign, donors have also enabled a host of initiatives aimed at boosting research capacity, capabilities, and excellence. Such investment has high dividends, as each project supported drives more research, advancements, solutions, and technologies, ensuring long-term far-reaching impact. FACULTY RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION BGU’s ability to advance relies on the presence of top-notch faculty members capable of performing impactful high-quality research and sharing their expertise in the classroom,

where they inspire our students – Israel’s future leaders. These exceptional human resources are central to the fulfillment of BGU’s mission, contributing broadly to both academic and research excellence, and their recruitment has a domino effect; they attract promising postgraduate researchers and students, increase our ability to obtain competitive research grants, fuel collaboration, and boost the University’s international stature. Donors are critical to our recruitment and retention efforts, partnering with the University to help us recruit the most outstanding candidates. President’s Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program Since the Way Forward Campaign was launched over 125 new researchers in diverse disciplines have been recruited across the University, among them four Distinguished Presidential Recruits, whose recruitment was directly facilitated with donor support. The President’s Distinguished Faculty Recruitment Program enables President Prof. Chamovitz to identify rising academic stars and provide the generous and competitive recruitment packages required to recruit them. This program has already enabled the recruitment of: Prof. Shira Chapman, the Carole and Marcus Weinstein Distinguished Presidential Recruit Dr. Eran Maniv, the Crown Family Distinguished Presidential Recruit Prof. Benjamin Palmer, the Nahum Guzik Distinguished Presidential Recruit Dr. Ilai Guendelman, the Diane and Guilford Glazer Distinguished Presidential Recruit These rising stars were on the radar of major universities around the world, and thus, BGU was not only competing with other Israeli universities for these young researchers – our competitors were among the best universities

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