The Annual Joy Grant program aims to promote and contribute to the emerging field of neuro-wellness. Neuro-wellness focuses on improving or enhancing the resilience of the healthy brain towards stress, emotional imbalance and instability, and understanding their underlying mechanisms.
The support this year will primarily focus on innovative technologies and research that can potentially impact human well-being, improve regulation of emotions in a personal and social context and increase mental and physical resilience under challenge.
We seek to support research efforts towards elucidating mechanisms that comprise and contribute to human wellness; generate new neuro-wellness-related knowledge through new implementations of existing data; or use state of the art scientific tools, technologies and new modalities to generate new approaches for sensing, monitoring, modulating and stimulating the human brain and body.
Themes & Topics of Interest
This year’s call for proposals will cover a wide span of technological and research aspects relating to neuro-wellness. Proposals that will be considered for the 2019 grant will include early-stage technologies, advanced research, or applied approaches that will eventually provide novel solutions for at least one of the following objectives, all focusing on healthy people:
- Novel technologies aimed at intervention for emotion regulation
- Emotion-sensing and characterizations
- Sensory neuromodulation for improving mood and emotion regulation or neuroenhancement to alter affective states in healthy individuals by non-pharmacological means
- Technological means for alleviating stress or uplifting mood
- Characterizing and understanding the neuroscience of habit formation & habitual behavior in humans
- Basic science of emotion regulation, resilience, homeostasis, and allostasis
- Multiparametric big data approaches for understanding, monitoring and predicting emotional states and mood
- Human-machine interactions (such as brain-computer interfaces) for improved emotional wellbeing in healthy individuals
Tracks and selection criteria
Applications for the 2019 grant call must be assigned to one of three tracks:
Novel technology
track
Covers novel technologies that are being developed or can be utilized towards one of the grant topics of interest.
Basic science or intervention track
Studies that aim to elucidate mechanisms that are relevant to…
Small study
and pilot track
Single year studies, intended mainly for technologies that are developed and should be piloted on health…
Eligibility
The grant will support research performed in academic education centers (universities and colleges) and medical research institutes in Israel. Collaborations between various academic disciplines, different Israeli research institutes, and/or with industry are highly encouraged. International collaborations and studies can apply – as long as at least 60% of the funding and the work will be done in Israel.
Applied approach is encouraged
We welcome basic research proposals as long as the future application of the research is clearly stated.
We support studies on human subjects that ultimately target healthy populations.
Who can apply for the Joy grant?
- Lab heads and principal investigators
- Post-doctoral fellows
- PhD candidates (with supervisor approval)
Joint interdisciplinary teams from any discipline are invited (neuroscience, psychology, life sciences, medicine, engineering, computer science, physics, humanities and others). Inter-disciplinary teams of researchers from exact/life sciences, together with researchers from social sciences and humanities are encouraged.
The Joy Grant Program
Joy Ventures aims to facilitate the creation of a joint, inter-disciplinary, collaborative ecosystem between academia and industry. The goal is to implement the latest advancements in neuroscience, technology and related fields for improving the everyday human experience and emotional well-being by cultivating mental resilience, reducing mental vulnerability and allowing people to cope beneficially with difficulties and challenges of daily life. Joy’s long-term goal is to create solutions catering individuals directly, with no need for FDA clearance or medical guidance/supervision.
The Joy Grant Program is an annual effort to support research in the neuro-wellness field. This is the third year of the program. The program will provide, each year, up to US $1 million (in aggregate) funding, to proposals consistent with the program’s goals, through a competitive application, review, and selection process.
Selected proposals in the technology or basic science tracks will be funded with amounts of
$40,000-$100,000 per annum, for two years, beginning January 1st, 2020; selected proposals in the pilot track will be funded with amounts of up to $20,000 for up to one year.
The grant does not support clinical studies and studies that focus on mental or physical diseases. To get a better idea of supported research, see previous grant winners and titles.