• THE ARAVA INSTITUTE
• Location & Purpose
• Academics & Research
• Recognition
• Alumni Leadership

• FRIENDS OF ARAVA
• Mission & Goals
• Building the Future
• Raising Awareness
• Get Involved
• Board & Staff
• Clergy Circle
• Archived Newsletters

THE ARAVA INSTITUTE

Academics & Research

Just as the Arava Institute integrates study, work and life in its goal of creating environmental leaders, it also integrates its academic and research programs to insure students fully participate in, and have an impact on, technologies and issues that will become the foundations for their career successes. And the Institute's fully-accredited undergraduate and graduate studies, co-existence training, and targeted research are gaining wider recognition and support across the professional spectrum: from academia and science, to politics and law.

Academics

Undergraduate and graduate studies are hands-on and location specific. While learning peace-building and leadership skills, students actively explore a range of environmental technologies and issues from a regional, interdisciplinary perspective. This unique educational experience gives students the building blocks for future cooperation and activism.

Masters degree studies unite AIES with another of the region's premier educational and research programs, Ben Gurion University's Baustein Centers for Desert Research. Here, graduate students can fully prepare for careers in environmental conservation, protection, regulation, planning and policy, as well as receiving an in-depth foundation toward any related doctoral specialties.

CLICK HERE for more information on Academics at AIES.

Research

Imagine the burgeoning populations of the Middle East growing healthy and much-needed food supplies on their own desert farmlands; or cultivating ancient seedlings that can provide valuable, life-saving medicines for diseases that now ravish impoverished lands throughout the world. Reversing the death of that ancient wonder, The Dead Sea, or transforming toxic, polluted streambeds into rivers of fresh, much-needed potable water?

These are some of the challenges facing the Mideast - and the world - as populations increase, climates change, and hunger, disease and discord find new places to take root.

Given those probable scenarios, ongoing and innovative research at the Arava Institute is critical. To that end, the Institute's policy is to allow for autonomous studies while encouraging research on applied initiatives that can have real, and often immediate, impact on detrimental environmental conditions. In this way, faculty, associates and students supplement the educational experience with research into effective - and often necessary - solutions to today's Mideastern challenges.

CLICK HERE for more information on Research at AIES.

Methusaleh Finds a Home

In 2005, a palm plant sprouted in a small pot in the greenhouses of the Arava Institute. What made this particular palm special was its birthright: this was an ancient, and famously recorded, Judean tree cultivated from a 2000-year-old seed found at the ruins of Masada, the last Judean redoubt that fell to the Roman legions in the first century CE. Though its existence is still somewhat precarious, "Methusaleh" continues to thrive and grow in its Arava home. The study and cultivation of historical plant species is part of a larger, ongoing - and global effort - to better understand the food-source and medicinal possibilities of such flora. It is studies like this that put AIES in the forefront of this type of innovative research.