Two BIU Researchers Secure €3.47 Million in ERC Grants

Two Bar-Ilan University researchers have been awarded ERC Starting Grants from the European Research Council (ERC), totaling €3,472,380. The grants will provide them with the support needed to pursue groundbreaking research that challenges fundamental assumptions in two distinctly different fields.

The recipients are Prof. Reuma Gadassi-Polack of the Faculty of Education and the Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who received a grant of €1,973,365, and Dr. Arnold Filtser of the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, who received €1,499,015.

Do Children’s Emotional Difficulties Affect Their Parents’ Mental Health?

For years, researchers seeking to understand how depression and anxiety develop within families have largely focused on one direction of influence: from parents to children. Studies have examined how genetics, parental mental health symptoms, and parenting behaviors may affect children’s psychological well-being.

Prof. Reuma Gadassi-Polack, a clinical psychologist who works with adolescents and their parents, aims to reverse the equation and ask a question that has received remarkably little research attention: Can children’s emotional difficulties, in turn, affect their parents’ mental health?

This question lies at the heart of the Child2Parent project, in which Prof. Gadassi-Polack will develop the first mechanistic model of symptom transmission from child to parent. The study will focus on processes that occur in everyday life, particularly the ways in which parents help their children regulate emotions—that is, modify the intensity and duration of emotional experiences and how those emotions are expressed.

The research will examine mother-adolescent pairs using an advanced combination of hormonal measures, brain imaging, and real-time data collected from participants’ daily lives. By shifting the focus toward children’s behavior and its impact on parents, the study is expected to provide new insights into how psychological difficulties develop and spread within families. In the longer term, these findings could contribute to the development of treatments and interventions that address the family as a whole.

How Can Complex “Distances” Be Simplified to Solve Technological Problems More Efficiently?

Dr. Arnold Filtser’s research addresses fundamental questions involving distance: How can we find the shortest route through a network? How can we quickly locate similar information, cluster data, or design an efficient network?

In the world of algorithms, “distance” does not necessarily refer to geography. It can represent travel time, financial cost, communication delay, or the degree of difference between two pieces of information. In large networks and databases, the structure of these distances can become highly complex, making such problems difficult to solve.

One of the central tools for addressing this complexity is metric embedding—a method that maps a complex space into a simpler and more structured one while approximately preserving the distances between points. Until now, however, research in this field has focused primarily on metric spaces, which obey strict rules. For example, the distance from A to B must equal the distance from B to A, and a direct route must always be shorter than an indirect one.

The real world does not always follow these rules. The price of a flight from A to B, for example, may differ from the price of the return flight, while a flight with a stopover may actually cost less than a direct flight.

In his ERC project, titled “(Non-)Metric Embeddings,” Dr. Filtser seeks to extend the concept of embeddings to situations in which metric rules do not apply. The development of this new algorithmic toolkit is expected to enable far more efficient solutions for routing in transportation and communication networks, improve data-search methods, and make it possible to tackle complex problems for which existing tools currently provide inadequate solutions.

Strengthening Bar-Ilan’s Global Research Standing

ERC Starting Grants are among Europe’s most prestigious and competitive research funding programs and are designed to support promising researchers at an early stage of their independent careers. The grants are awarded to outstanding researchers pursuing ambitious ideas with the potential to generate significant breakthroughs in their fields.

The two new grants reflect the breadth and excellence of research at Bar-Ilan University. The approximately €3.47 million in funding further strengthens the University’s growing international research profile and reinforces its position at the forefront of scientific discovery, while empowering researchers to challenge established assumptions and push the boundaries of knowledge.