Announcements

Spotlight on Science 2023-2024

Posted: 11.03.2024

The Staff Scientists Council is thrilled to finally be able to bring you the (postponed) schedule of this year's Spotlight on Science lectures.

The dates and speakers for this year are:

  • March 20: Dr. Michal Schwartz (Department of Molecular Genetics)
  • April 17: Dr. Nitzan Akerman (Department of Phyics Complex Systems)
  • May 22: Dr. Alon Rubin (Department of Brain Sciences)
  • June 20: Dr. Udi Fonio (Department of Physics of Complex Systems)
  • July 11: Dr. Yael Eshed Eisenbach (Department of Molecular Cell Biology

Lecture topics and locations will be announced as they become available.

Many thanks to Dr. Yael Aylon and Dr. Ayelet Vilan for all their hard work on twice organizing this series of lectures.

Spotlight on Science 2022-2023

Posted: 07.11.2022

The Staff Scientists Council is proud to announce the 2022-2023 schedule for the Spotlight on Science series of lectures.

This year will have lectures from:

  • Nov. 30, 2022: Dr. Enrico Segre, Physics Core Facilities
  • Dec. 28, 2022: Dr. Noa Novershtern, Department of Molecular Genetics
  • Jan. 25, 2023: Dr. Lothar Houben, Department of Chemical Research Support
  • Mar. 30, 2022: Dr. Orna Dahan, Department of Molecular Genetics
  • Apr. 19, 2023: Dr. Gabriel Rosenblum, Department of Chemical and Structural Biology
  • May 31, 2023: Dr. Inbal Biton, Department of Veterinary Resources
  • Jun. 28, 2023: Dr. Einat Zalckvar, Department of Molecular Genetics

Details on each lecture will be announced as available.

Message to PIs re Acknowledging Staff Scientists on Scientific Publications

Posted: 03.01.2022

Today (03/01/2022), the Staff Scientists Appointments and Promotions committee sent out the email below addressed to all WIS PIs. The email is a reminder to the PIs to acknowledge on publications any staff scientist who contributed to the research, in particular staff scientists in the core facility units. At the same time, staff scientists are encouraged to be proactive in ensuring that they receive the recognition due to them for their work. As the committee points out, just because the PI paid for the services from their research budgets, this is not a valid excuse for excluding a staff scientists from the list of authors.


Dear WIS PIs,

As members of the Staff Scientists appointments and promotions committee, we would like to kindly call your attention to a recurrent issue that we have observed during the committee work – lack of adequate recognition of the work of staff scientists on manuscripts. In particular, we have noticed cases where staff scientists from the Core Facility Units (CFU) are not properly acknowledged for their contributions in the form of authorship.

The Staff Scientists track is an academic one – meaning that promotions are decided based on academic achievements and merit – manuscripts, talks/posters at conferences, teaching etc… This also means that a similar scientific process to that which applies to group leaders also applies to staff scientists. Acknowledgment of an intellectual contribution on manuscripts (as an author or other acknowledgment in the manuscript as appropriate) is therefore crucial to ensure timely promotion and essential for us to be able to recruit and sustain high quality scientists in this track. In addition, it is also a source of pride and a sense of accomplishment and hence, obviously, should not be denied from staff scientists.

We are all very fortunate to enjoy outstanding service at our CFUs. Academic personnel of these units are the ones who allow these services to exist and further develop in line with the progress of science. While it is true that we pay for the services we get from Staff Scientists in the CFUs, this should be viewed similarly to the fellowships that we pay our own students and trainees. Consequently – if a Staff Scientist from a CFU contributed data that would merit authorship of your own student, please make sure to give authorship to the Staff Scientist as well. If a Staff Scientist provided help that does not warrant authorship, please still make sure to acknowledge their help in the acknowledgment section. Please also make sure to bring to their attention the publication, prior to submission of the manuscript, to give them the opportunity to critically review their part in the research.

 

Thank you for taking this into consideration.

The members of the Staff Scientists appointments and promotions committee: 

Maya Schuldiner

Eran Bouchbinder

Valery Krizhanovsky

Ami Navon

Ofer Feinerman

David (Didi) Margulis

Phillip Selenko

The Revised (March 2021) Staff Scientists Council Takanon (Protocols)

Posted: 08.03.2021

At the general assembly of the staff scientists held by Zoom on March 1, 2021, the revised protocols (takanon) of the Staff Scientists Council was approved. The primary changes made were:

  • increasing the term from two to three years
  • reducing the size of the council from eleven to seven members
  • making two members of the executive committee sectorial representatives
  • adding the criteria that the at least one member of the executive committee is from a research group and at least one from a support unit and that all three members cannot be from the same sector
  • changing the numbers of sectorial representatives to three for the life sciences, two for chemistry and one for the other faculties

The revised version is available in Hebrew and English (new).

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