The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) recently published the list of individual research grant winners for the 2024-2025 academic year. ISF grants are awarded on the basis of scientific excellence and project quality in the fields of exact sciences and technology, life sciences and medicine, and the humanities and social sciences.
The following Reichman University researchers have been awarded ISF grants:
Dr. Boaz Zik of the Tiomkin School of Economics, with Dr. Ran Weksler of the Hebrew University, for their research project “Selling Certification”:
This study focuses on certification markets — markets in which a third party provides the service of testing and certifying information about the quality of participants or products — and examines how tests, incentives, and market structures should be designed in these markets. In particular, the study considers how the structure of the certification market influences agents’ decisions to invest in training or quality improvement, what problems may arise when certification is sold for profit, and what role public regulation can play in improving market outcomes. To address these questions, the researchers developed theoretical models using advanced tools from mechanism design and information modeling, enabling the analysis of certification markets in environments that involve adverse selection, moral hazard, and constraints on the kinds of tests that certifiers can perform. The study provides new insights into incentives, investment, and access to certification in markets where reliable information is essential.
Prof. Tsachi Ein-Dor of the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology for his research project “Defining Resilience: A Multi-Layered Analysis of Psychological, Genetic, and Epigenetic Responses in the Aftermath of the October 7 Attack”:
In a world increasingly marked by traumatic events, a critical question remains: Why do some people demonstrate resilience while others struggle to cope? The October 7, 2023 terrorist attack in Israel is a contemporary example of collective trauma that challenges the mechanisms of psychological resilience at multiple levels. Decades of research in psychology, sociology, and biology have laid the foundation for understanding resilience, highlighting psychological factors such as coping mechanisms, emotional regulation, and social support, and have begun to reveal biological factors as well. However, the complex dynamics between these factors — the psychobiological basis of resilience — remain largely unexplained. While resilience research has significantly advanced our understanding of psychological components, it must be expanded to examine biological tendencies that may shape one’s predisposition towards resilience or vulnerability. Studies indicate that approximately 50% of the variance in resilience levels stems from genetic influences, a figure that underscores the importance of the biological component and its dynamic interaction with environmental factors.
This study seeks to reduce the existing gap by integrating psychological and biological factors to deepen our understanding of resilience. Moreover, the majority of studies in the field rely on retrospective data, which are prone to memory bias and are often unable to capture immediate psychobiological responses to trauma. This project uses a prospective design with measurements taken before and after the event as part of the long-term longitudinal “Alpha Project.” That design will allow real-time documentation of psychobiological changes among people affected by the attack, yielding a clearer picture of how resilience develops. By innovatively combining genetic, epigenetic, and psychological measures, the study aims to identify profiles of resilience versus vulnerability. Using expression-based polygenic risk scores (ePRS), DNA-methylation measures, and psychological assessments, the study will examine how genetic predispositions and environmental stressors shape the resilience process together. This approach not only addresses the limitations of retrospective designs, but also enables a deeper understanding of resilience as a dynamic and multidimensional phenomenon. This study represents a leap forward in understanding resilience as a complex interplay between biology and psychology, with the potential to uncover insights that extend beyond the events of October 7 to broader conflicts and a variety of life challenges.
Prof. Yael Parag of the School of Sustainability Founded by Israel Corp., ICL & ORL and Dr. Tamar Yogev of the Adelson School of Entrepreneurship, for their research project “Energy Islands: A Socio-Technical and Multidimensional Conceptualization”:
Against the backdrop of the worsening climate crisis and the growing need for energy independence, alongside the declining costs of renewable energy technologies, autonomous and isolated energy systems — known as “energy islands” — are proliferating around the world. These systems are presented as promising solutions to pressing social and environmental challenges, including energy security, climate resilience, and sustainable development. Although the term “energy island” is commonly used in professional discourse, academic research on the subject remains scarce, and often focuses on what these systems lack — namely, connection to broader networks — rather than on what makes them unique.
This project will examine energy islands as a complex socio-technological and economic phenomenon encompassing technological, infrastructural, regulatory, economic, and social dimensions. It aims to develop a comprehensive analytical framework to characterize the types of energy islands, assess their degrees of isolation or autonomy, and evaluate their impacts on energy services, energy security, the environment, and distributive justice. In this framework, the researchers will also investigate the role of technological innovation and entrepreneurship in the development of new types of energy islands and their potential to change these systems’ configuration and contributions.
As part of the project, the researchers will develop an innovative typology and “islandness” index and gather qualitative and quantitative data from literature reviews, interviews with relevant stakeholders, case studies, and energy-system models. The research will focus on three main objectives: (1) developing a universal assessment framework for energy islands that includes a set of socio-technological and economic indicators; (2) mapping the motives, interests, and influences of the different actors involved in the planning and operation of energy islands, and identifying synergies and trade-offs between the various dimensions of islandness; and (3) generating insights into the implications of widespread adoption of energy islands for governance, policy, regulation, and systemic resilience.
Dr. Yonat Zwebner and Dr. Moshe Miller of the Arison School of Business for their research project “From Face to Phrase: Decoding the Association Between Facial Appearance and Written Expression”:
As online platforms such as Yelp, Amazon, and Google Maps encourage users to share both images and text, a growing trend is emerging in which consumers express their identities through a combination of facial images and written content. This dual modality boosts perceived credibility and engagement, yet little is known about how a person’s facial appearance may reflect their written expression, or how this congruence influences consumer behavior.
This study investigates how accurately faces can be matched to written text and the mechanisms underlying this ability, such as affective states and personality traits. The researchers employ a multi-method approach that combines human perception experiments and machine learning. Initial findings indicate that both human observers and machine-learning models are able to pair faces with written content, and that this congruence is related to emotional and personality characteristics.
Theoretically, this study links facial visual cues with written expression, thereby expanding our understanding of identity as it is expressed in visual and textual modalities. From a managerial perspective, face-text congruence may help companies target consumers based on facial visual cues, enhancing engagement and trust. The findings have implications for the fields of marketing, fraud detection, and consumer behavior analysis.
Prof. Shimon Kogan of the Arison School of Business for his research project “AI-Based Personality Extraction: Economic Applications”:
Recent studies show that personality traits shape our lives more powerfully than demographic factors, such as age or income. Until now, personality has typically been measured through small, often unreliable surveys. The current study introduces a new tool based on advances in artificial intelligence that is capable of identifying personality traits from a single facial photograph. This tool examines the influence of personality on career choice, labor-market success, and financial behavior.
The project aims to understand the extent to which personality traits influence financial outcomes, and whether the effect stems from individuals’ own behavior or others’ perceptions of them. The tool is designed to enable large-scale studies that were not possible in the past, and to change the way we understand the role of personality in shaping life trajectories.
Prof. Tamar Saguy of the Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, with Dr. Miriam Nechama Yaffe of Tel Aviv University, for their research project “The Third Shift: Conceptualization, Measurement and Mechanisms”:
Parents’ daily lives include numerous household and childcare tasks, including cooking, cleaning, bathing children and driving them to after-school activities. These tasks are commonly referred to as the “second shift” — reflecting the burden they place on top of paid work, which constitutes the “first shift.” Studies on the second shift consistently show that women shoulder a disproportionate share of housework and childcare.
The proposed study identifies an additional family burden that exists above and beyond the second shift: the continuous work of planning, organizing, monitoring, and following up on family members’ schedules and needs. Unlike the practical tasks of the second shift, the burden of the third shift is primarily mental. It persists nonstop in the parent’s mind, and often has no visible, tangible output (for example, tracking school holidays or maintaining grocery lists).
Although this mental load likely affects those who carry it, it remains understudied. In the proposed project, we term this load the “third shift” to reflect the additional burden it places on parents, on top of paid work and the practical demands of housework and childcare. The aim of the study is to measure and investigate this load and its components, assess whether it is also disproportionately borne by women, and examine its associations with well-being indicators such as life, career, and relationship satisfaction. A deeper understanding of this mental load will significantly expand knowledge about unpaid work — work that is often invisible but constitutes a significant burden on women.
Prof. Ron Shahar of the Arison School of Business for his research project “Sell Me a Story: AI to the Rescue”:
Two dogs + one bone = conflict. And where there is conflict, there is a story. This is the most basic formula of storytelling. With the growing popularity of storytelling in marketing, the question arises: does conflict make advertisements more effective? This is just one of the questions at the center of a study that aims to fundamentally change our understanding of the impact of stories on humans — using ads as an example — while establishing new standards for AI-driven video content analysis.
The study examines how storytelling elements — primarily conflict — affect advertising success. This is the first attempt of its kind to combine deep narrative understanding with large-scale video content analysis. The initial findings are encouraging: AI is able to identify complex narrative elements, including conflict, and analyses reveal that these elements — along with mechanisms such as curiosity — play a central role in the success of advertisements.
Prof. Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science for his research project “Vision-Language Models and Generative-AI for Co-Creation”:
Research in the field of artificial intelligence has advanced significantly in recent years, especially in the areas of computer vision, graphics, and natural language processing. Today, generative vision-language (GenAI) models enable the creation of high-quality content in visual art, literature, music, animation, and more. The creative capabilities of these models are poised to transform human creative processes. However, challenges remain that prevent the wider adoption of GenAI: the difficulty of navigating a multitude of options for possible outputs, a lack of personalization, limited control over the final product, and, more generally, the technology remains insufficiently understood.
The project’s primary goal is to develop tools that enable AI to support the human creative process. The creative process can be broken down into two main stages, which we call the exploration stage and the definition stage. These stages have somewhat opposite goals: exploration is intended to open up the creative search space and allow for the assessment of alternatives, while definition focuses on the process of a specific creation. The research program addresses both stages and promotes human-AI co-creation in a range of outputs, such as images and videos. The expectation is for this research to help people better harness the power of generative models, while also advancing AI’s ability to collaborate with and be responsive to humans. This goal may have implications not only for creative processes, but also for the development of better models for general human-AI collaboration.