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The Focal Initiatives in Research in Science and Technology (FIRST) fund ran as an experimental program within The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. After five year of operation an international committee was requested to examine the program. According to the committee´s recommendations the FIRST fund was established in 2002 in the framework of the Israel Science Foundation.
The FIRST individual research grant track has been recently changed, in order to emphasize the its support of studies characterized by "high risk" in all areas, starting new research directions, included in one of the categories listed below:
• Original and innovative research directions that are not extensions of conventional research approaches. Breakthrough research with the potential to open new horizons, new areas or directions in an exciting field, which so far, have been unexplored. The investigator is to briefly explain where the proposaed research is placed in relation to the forefront of research in these areas, and what the consequences are if the research succeeds.
• Research directions aimed at developing new research concepts essentially different from those accepted in the field and which have the potential to change conventional perceptions of the area..
• Developing techniques or new technologies that allow overcoming critical barriers in the research area. The researcher is to specify in detail the barriers, what are the limitations in existing techniques, and how the new development will contribute to the solution.
• Research proposals with the potential for a breakthrough, and which the possibility of performing them is questionable due to significant technical difficulties. The researcher needs to explicitly specify the main technical difficulty that could jeopardize the feasibility of the study and to place the relative technical difficulty of the existing research frontier.
Up to five grants, totaling up to a budget of 360,000 NIS a year will be granted, with each grant up to three years.
Guidelines
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