42 By funding frontier-pushing projects over a period of at least five years, the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) grants enable outstanding researchers such as this year’s four winners fromBar-Ilan tomaximize their chances of success— in advancing science, a just society, and the study of the Jewish tradition. ERC SYNERGY GRANT Synergy grants fund collaboration between groups in a given field, equipping highly accomplished researchers to work together to solve intractable scientific challenges. Research that Goes the Distance ERC Grantees Prof. Shulamit Michaeli Overcoming Parasites’ Drug Resistance through RNA Editing Vice President for Research Prof. Shulamit Michaeli of theMina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, together with Prof. Gerald Spaeth of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and Prof. Yitzhak Pilpel of Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, have been awarded 9million euros for a project that aims to uncover the molecular means by which Leishmania—the parasites that cause the disfiguring and sometimes deadly disease Leishmaniasis, which currently affects more than 12 million people a year—develop drug resistance through changes to their genome. Through RNA analysis, network modelling, and single-cell sequencing, the project will work to curb these genetic adaptations, understand how the parasite benefits from them, and mitigate the toxic effects of the “unwanted” genes. Moreover, since genomic adaptations are a common strategy in cancer cells, Michaeli’s team hopes its findings can also lead to improvements in cancer-drug resistance. Dr. Avi Shmidman Using AI Analysis to Decipher Ancient HebrewManuscripts Dr. Avi Shmidman of the Faculty of Jewish Studies, along with Profs. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra and Judith Olszowy-Schlanger of the Paris-Sciences-Lettres University and Prof. Nachum Dershowitz of Tel Aviv University, was awarded 10million euros to develop computational methods for analyzing medieval Hebrew manuscripts. The project—the first within the field of Jewish studies to be awarded a Synergy Grant—plans to aid in the deciphering and dating of the tens of thousands of surviving handwritten documents, as well as to make them available to both scholars and the general public everywhere.
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