Harvard's Kempner Institute Launches $50,000 Seed Grants for Israeli Research Ties
The Kempner Institute at Harvard University has announced the Moise Y. Safra Collaborative Research Award, a program of $50,000 seed grants for collaborations with academic research institutions in Israel. Applications opened on October 13, 2026.
- The Kempner Institute at Harvard announced the Moise Y. Safra Collaborative Research Award.
- The award provides $50,000 seed grants for collaboration with Israeli academic research institutions.
- Applicants must be current Kempner faculty or research fellows and include at least one Israeli academic collaborator.
- Applications opened on October 13, 2026, with details on the Kempner Institute website.
What the award provides
According to the Kempner Institute, the Moise Y. Safra Collaborative Research Award at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence will give $50,000 seed grants. The money is meant to support collaborative research and scholarly exchange between the Kempner Institute and academic research institutions in Israel.
The institute says the program is intended to advance compelling research that fits its mission to understand intelligence in natural and artificial systems. It also serves the goals of the Kempner Safra Collaborative gift, which aims to strengthen intellectual exchange between researchers in the United States and Israel.
Who can apply
The award is open to current Kempner Institute faculty and research fellows. Each seed grant application must include at least one collaborator at an Israeli academic institution, so the funding is tied to joint projects rather than work carried out on one side alone.
Applications opened on October 13, 2026. The institute directs applicants to its website for eligibility requirements and application details. The announcement does not state a deadline, the number of grants available or the length of the funding period, so those points should be checked on the institute's site.
The institute's mission
The Kempner Institute describes its goal as understanding the basis of intelligence in natural and artificial systems. It does this by recruiting and training future generations of researchers to study intelligence from biological, cognitive, engineering and computational perspectives.
The institute states that its premise is that natural and artificial intelligence are intimately interconnected. In its words, the next generation of artificial intelligence will require the same principles that our brains use for fast, flexible natural reasoning, and understanding how our brains compute and reason can be elucidated by theories developed for AI.
What it means
For Kempner faculty and research fellows, the award offers a dedicated source of early funding for projects with Israeli partners. For Israeli academic institutions, it creates a route to joint work with a Harvard institute focused on both brain science and AI. The scale of the grants, at $50,000 each, positions them as seed funding to start collaborations rather than to sustain large programs.
Kempner Institute (Harvard): Announcing the Moise Y. Safra Collaborative Research Award at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence
