Even as tensions over the Israel-Hamas war continue to simmer on California’s college campuses, a quiet effort at UC Davis seeks to show people just how valuable cooperation can be.
The California-Israel Collaborations in Research Program, which funds grants for early research done by Israeli and Davis academics, is about promoting the sciences — but it also has a bigger mission.
“The idea was to do something that would be not just pushing back on negative things that were happening on campus, but actually do something that was positive,” said Jay Rosenheim, a retired professor of entomology at UC Davis and co-chair of the program’s advisory committee, and “create a clear signal that UC Davis is welcoming to Israeli academics and to Jewish students.”
The program gives out grants for research done as a partnership between a UC Davis faculty member and a researcher from Israel. The two-year grants of around $20,000 are considered modest for science research, but they’re designed to help incubate projects that have the potential of finding additional funding down the line.
“It’s just to get the thing to germinate, and then hopefully after that, the researchers will secure big pots of money from somewhere else,” Rosenheim said.
Between 2016 and 2023, the program awarded 24 grants, totaling more than $250,000.
The grants have funded everything from cancer vaccine research to sustainable barley breeding to internet ad analysis since it was founded in 2016 by UC Davis mathematician Joel Hass. He brought together Davis faculty who wanted to push back against the anti-Israel rhetoric and calls for an academic boycott they saw on campus.
“It’s only gotten worse since then,” Rosenheim acknowledged.
Magali Billen, a professor of geophysics and chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at UC Davis, got a grant in 2019 (though the project was postponed because of Covid).
She worked with Yuval Boneh, a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, on a project to improve the mathematical modeling of what happens under the surface of the Earth when tectonic plates slide under one another — something quite relevant on the coast of Northern California.
“I’m a numerical modeler, and he’s a person who actually deforms rocks in the lab, and so I take the data that he creates and I put it into my model,” Billen said. “It was really a chance for cross-disciplinary learning.”
The grant, she said, was an opportunity for them to get together, free of distractions, and just talk about ideas. It’s the kind of opportunity that’s “precious” for a busy academic, she pointed out.
“There’s no way we would have been able to make that kind of progress without being able to sit in the room, you know, just day after day, with each other,” she said.
That’s the kind of synergy between scientists that the grants seek to generate.
“In the private sector, this collaboration has been whirring away for many, many years, but we’d like to create a parallel collaboration in the academic realm,” Rosenheim said.
A side benefit of the grant program comes from showing Davis faculty a more normalized side of Israelis and Israeli life.
“Most of the UC Davis cooperators are not Jewish,” Rosenheim said. “They’re not expat Israelis or anything like that. They’re just rank-and-file faculty, many of whom know absolutely nothing about Israel.
“To actually have them go to Israel and see it up close is really a valuable thing.” Jay Rosenheim, UC Davis
That was true for Billen, who visited Israel in May 2023. She said learning about the geology of Israel and speaking with Israeli counterparts was “really fantastic.”
“It was also just an opportunity to talk with them and learn more about Israel and to learn more about the diversity of people, where they’ve come from,” she said. “It made me take time to go online and read more history.”
Grants for the program are given annually, although there was a break from 2020 to 2022 related to the pandemic and one in 2024 because it seemed too hard to require Israeli academics to write proposals in the midst of war, Rosenheim said. But now the program is back up and running. The most recent round of applications closed in February.
“The war continues, right? But life in Israel also has to continue,” Rosenheim said. “So we’re getting back to our normal operating, even though things are still pretty challenging.”
With the Trump administration slashing funds for scientific research, programs like the one at UC Davis may become more important in the future.
Rosenheim added that the Davis grants are not intended to support large-scale research projects; for that, academics may need to start looking outside the U.S. if funding is eviscerated.
“I’m not sure anybody has really processed what the new reality will be once the dust settles,” he said.
Until recently, the Davis program was funded straight out of the pockets of university faculty who supported the mission. (Donors don’t pick the grant winners; that is handled through the UC Davis Office of Research, which handles the operational end.)
But in 2024, the program started to receive funding from the S.F.-based Koret Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, allowing for more stability. With that backing, the program is looking to expand to other California schools, with UC Berkeley and Stanford topping the list.
Billen said she’s glad to hear about an expansion, because early-stage funding can be meaningful for partnerships like the one between her and Boneh.
“It really set the stage for us to start a collaboration that we wouldn’t have done otherwise,” she said, “so I think it really made a huge difference.”