PUMBY
The Forum for the Advancement of Interdisciplinary Studies in Israel

The rationale: connecting leading scholars across different fields will lead to novel research through synergies that could not have been achieved within each area of study on its own.

The current decentralized structure of Israeli academia, divided into departments and faculties separated by field, fails to encourage collaboration between different disciplines, a fact that is reflected in Israel’s poor international ranking in this area. The PUMBY Initiative is intended to encourage these kinds of collaborations and to create a funding stream for them. The project comprises two stages: (1) intimate, intensive meetings of researchers from disparate fields intended to create a basis for collaboration; and (2) funding of selected projects that arise from these meetings.

Each PUMBY meeting will include approximately 40 mid-career researchers, from a variety of disciplines and institutions, with demonstrated interest in multi-disciplinary research. The meetings will take place in a relatively isolated location, to encourage deep interaction amount participants, free from distractions. Group activities will create opportunities for discussion and collaborative work. Participants will then have the opportunity to submit funding proposals for innovative, groundbreaking, interdisciplinary research based on collaborations that were generated at the meeting.

These proposals will be judged by a multi-disciplinary committee composed of prominent, senior scholars. One of the most important criteria for winning financial support will be the novelty of a project’s interdisciplinary approach, that is, how innovative is the inter-disciplinary collaboration relative to prior research efforts?

Similar interdisciplinary initiatives around the world have already shown that the creativity of participating researchers engenders unanticipated, original approaches. Indeed, the very encounter with the other, simply bringing together disparate spheres of knowledge that do not have a forum for regular interaction, should in and of itself advance the academic world to fascinating places and arouse new and inspired thinking that cannot currently be envisioned. Creating these kinds of connections between different disciplines has great potential but gaps in modes of thinking and research methods between fields also pose significant challenges to novel collaborations. The PUMBY Initiative has already demonstrated that it can bridge these gaps, and thus significantly advance interdisciplinary research in Israel.

And so we say, PUMBY is life.