The purpose of the school is to educate the future generation of leading European and Israeli researchers, while emphasizing a broad education; Experimental, practical and theoretical in multidisciplinary areas in the gap between engineering, computational biology and life sciences.
The Technion in collaboration with the Hebrew University and the research institute Max Delbruck Center-Berlin (MDC-Berlin), Humboldt University and the "Sharita Berlin" medical center won a competitive grant of 1.8 million euros to establish an international program for paying PhDs "SignGene". The program, sponsored by the Helmholtz German Science Association, is one of the first of its kind in Europe and will be a program of excellence that will admit outstanding students in the life sciences and medicine with an emphasis on cellular signaling, genetic expression control, quantitative and systems biology, and biomedicine.
The purpose of the school is to educate the future generation of leading European and Israeli researchers, while emphasizing a broad education; Experimental, practical and theoretical in multidisciplinary areas in the gap between engineering, computational biology and life sciences.
Students who are accepted into the program will be guided by a joint, Israeli and German team of instructors and will be an integral part of the program in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Berlin. In addition, the program will include a "summer school" and international conferences in both Israel and Germany where the students will be exposed to world-leading scientists in the areas of the program.
The program will include training in essential topics for future scientists such as; Scientific writing and methods for managing research groups.
In the current program there are about 25 groups, half of them from MDC. From the Technion the following groups participate:
In the Faculty of Medicine from the Cancer Research Center: Prof. Aharon Chachanover, Prof. Israel Woladevski, Prof. Gera Neufeld and Dr. Amir Orin. From the Faculty of Biomedicine: Prof. Amit Meler. From the Faculty of Biology: Prof. Michael Glickman and Prof. Yael Mendel Gutfreund.
The Helmholtz Association, within which the program is carried out, is a community that includes 18 centers in the scientific-technical and biological-medical fields, and employs about 34 thousand people, with an annual budget of about 3.4 billion euros. These data make it the largest research organization in Germany. The Helmholtz centers deal with the main challenges facing humanity in the fields of society, science and industry, and the scientists [working in the Association's schools] carry out highly advanced research in strategic programs in six core areas: energy, land and environment, health, key technologies, structure and material, and lastly - aeronautics , space and transportation. The association is named after Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94), one of the great natural scientists of the 19th century.
The Helmholtz Association has been supporting the development of training programs for doctoral students since 2006. 19 nominations were sent to this year's competition, and the "SignGene" program was selected. The project and the fund are based on the annual increase in the association's fund, and are supported by the governments (the federal government and the governments of the states in Germany) based on the research and innovation law.
