On May 6, 2025, the beautiful Dubnov Gallery in central Tel Aviv hosted a significant milestone in the life of the Azrieli Fellows Program: the final Early Career Faculty Fellows Forum.
Nine outstanding incoming Azrieli Fellows presented their work in engaging short talks. The presentations covered such topics as ancient agricultural diet, the role of AI in developing personalized placebo treatments, the use of social media in trauma therapy, and advancements in computational psychiatry—highlighting how Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellows are both pushing academic boundaries and applying technology to improve quality of life.
This was the last cohort of Faculty Fellows as this fellowship track is being phased out. But this ending is, in fact, a measure of success. The Early Career Faculty Fellowship, launched a decade ago to support promising new faculty in Israel, has proven so effective that it inspired a new government-led initiative with a similar model. This national program has now taken up the mission on a broader scale, making the original Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship redundant.
The evening was therefore bittersweet—on one hand, a celebration of everything the Early Career Faculty Fellows have achieved over the years, and on the other, a moment of transition as the program concludes and the Azrieli Fellows Program moves into new arenas.
Early Career Faculty Fellows from previous cohorts and international postdoctoral fellows were among the audience. Notably, two presenters were alumni of the Azrieli Graduate Studies Fellowship, offering a full-circle moment. Seeing them evolve from graduate students to faculty members over the years has revealed the long-term impact of the Early Career Fellows Program. It has been a pleasure to support their intellectual and personal growth and see them blossom.
To watch the fellows’ TED Talks, click the following link:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDJ3qu20D0qr55uhWzhYwjoQgji7wLi-1&feature=shared
