President Shimon Peres hosted a group of young scientists from Israel and France at his residence Tuesday, with the participation of Minister of Science and Technology, Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz, the Ambassador of France, Mr. Christophe Bigot, and the Vice President of the France-Israel Foundation, Mrs. Dina Sorek.
Israel's Ministry of Science and Technology, the France-Israel Foundation, and the Embassy of France in Israel are jointly hosting, for the very first time, a three-day conference for young scientists this week at the Mount Zion Hotel in Jerusalem. This multi-disciplinary conference comprises 15 young scientists from Israel and 12 from France who received research grants from the European Union for ground-breaking research. The research scientists from both countries will present the results of their work in a variety of areas for which they received the prestigious grants.
The Israeli scientists are from the leading academic institutions in the country: the Technion, the Weizmann Institute, the Hebrew University, Ben-Gurion University, Bar Ilan University, and Tel Aviv University.
The initiative for the conference came from the Israeli-French High Council for Scientific and Technological Cooperation, which convenes annually jointly with the France-Israel Foundation. In 2004, an agreement was signed by both countries according to which Israel and France will jointly invest one million dollars annually to fund scientific research.
The research program of the European Research Council, which operates within the framework of the European 7th Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Development, began operating in 2007 and is considered today to be among the most prestigious in the world. More than 10,000 researchers from the member states of the EU submitted their candidacy to receive grants; of them 563 outstanding young scientists have thus far been chosen from 21 different countries.