82 Support for Israel is in short supply on today’s college campus, both on account of a hostile and vocal minority and an uninformed majority with no real stake in the discourse. Yet thanks to Bar-Ilan’s leadership of a new Erasmus Mundus program, Europe’s top universities are about to gain a newand impressive group of Israel ambassadors: the next generation of brain researchers and neuro-tech entrepreneurs. The NeuroData Joint Master’s Degree, part of the European Union’s elite Erasmus Mundus program for transnational study, is a collaboration between five leading universities in Europe and Bar-Ilan, which was selected to coordinate the program. Combining neuroscience with the computational skills required to understand howwe process information, the two-year degree is designed to prepare graduates who can help develop new technologies for diagnosing and treating brain disorders and injury. Significantly, while students can spend their second year at any of the consortium’s other member institutions—the University of Lisbon in Portugal, the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, the University of Zagreb in Croatia, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and University of Padua in Italy—all accepted applicants must spend their first year at Bar-Ilan. “This innovative degree will bring to Bar-Ilan some of the world’s most outstanding students of brain science, most of whom would never otherwise come to the Jewish state,” explains Prof. Alon Korngreen of the Leslie and Susan Gonda All Neural Pathways Lead to Bar-Ilan The Erasmus Mundus Program Prof. Alon Korngreen (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who will act as the director of the consortium. “In turn, they will bring to universities and companies around the world not only a solid grounding in a field that’s reshaping the future of medicine. They will also bring a new perspective on and connection to Israel, which we hope they’ll share with fellow students and scientists everywhere.”
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