MIT professors on the roots of Israeli scientific excellence

Yarom Ariav is right to sound the alarm about Israel’s brain drain, but not every departure represents a loss. For a small country, scientific excellence depends on deep integration into the global research ecosystem.

Training abroad has always been central to Israel’s academic success, allowing Israeli scholars to develop expertise in emerging specialties and build enduring professional ties. These relationships become strategic assets for Israel: colleagues in academia, industry, and government whose understanding of Israel comes from direct collaboration rather than distant narratives.

Now more than ever, Israel benefits from having its best and brightest working side by side with peers around the world. The challenge, therefore, is not preventing Israelis from leaving. It is ensuring that movement abroad becomes a cycle of learning, connection, and return.

In our experience, those ties endure when they are embedded not only in Israeli networks but also in broader academic communities that actively value collaboration with Israel. This requires deliberate effort: cultivating vibrant communities of Israeli scholars and allies at leading institutions while creating credible pathways for return.

In the aftermath of October 7, we co-founded Kalaniyot, a faculty-led initiative that supports Israeli scholars in advanced training and collaborative research at top universities around the world and brings together a broad community of faculty and institutional partners who actively welcome Israeli collaboration.

What began as a refuge from campus hostility soon revealed a deeper opportunity: to build a global intellectual community where connections to Israel are strengthened. Launched at MIT, the initiative has expanded to chapters at universities including Harvard, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, Cornell, and USC, and it continues to grow. These international networks accelerate discovery and lay the foundation for long-term collaboration and innovation.

We have already seen Kalaniyot Fellows return to Israel to establish laboratories, bringing with them cutting-edge expertise and global collaborations. Just as important, many in our community remain deeply engaged with Israel while abroad by co-supervising students, building joint research programs, and strengthening institutional ties.

Programs that support Israelis training abroad should therefore be seen not as concessions to brain drain but as investments in Israel’s long-term intellectual infrastructure.

Israel’s greatest resource has always been its human capital. Sending Israeli scholars abroad is an investment that, if managed wisely, can yield extraordinary returns. What looks like brain drain can become brain circulation—and ultimately brain gain.