Company profile:

The Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat

The Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences in Eilat (IUI) evolved from the H. Steinitz Marine Biology Laboratory (MBL) established by the Hebrew University in 1968. Over a decade of intensive activities in the Red Sea followed, in which pioneering surveys and research in all marine sciences disciplines were performed in the eastern Sinai shores and related deep sea. Such activities, including extensive teaching programs, were carried out in cooperation with scientists from Tel-Aviv and Bar-Ilan Universities.

In 1985 the wide scopes and the heterogeneity of scientific disciplines at the MBL, induced the Israel Council for Higher Education (ICHU) to transform the MBL into a national facility, shared by all universities in the country. Consequently, the IUI was established as the only interuniversity teaching and research facility in Israel, directly reporting to the Budget and Coordinating Committee (BCC) of the ICHU. The operating budget of the IUI is now mostly based on an annual allocation by the BCC.

Research

Research activities at the IUI span the whole spectrum of marine sciences, including ecology, chemical, physical and biological oceanography, ichthyology, Invertebrate and vertebrate biology, neurobiology, molecular biology and marine biogeochemistry.

Specific research activities are made possible by grants from a variety of extramural sources such as the Fund for Basic Research of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, The US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, The German-Israeli Science Foundation, the European Community and more.

Teaching

Apart from the training of graduate students, the IUI focuses on providing a series of undergraduate and graduate courses that are carried out intensively during one to two weeks periods. Dormitories are available on site allowing teaching activities to extend well into evening and night hours. The curriculum, reflecting all marine disciplines mentioned above, is based on about 20 Interuniversity Courses that are open to students of all Universities, and about 10 University Courses that are carried out by a single University. The total average yearly number of students at the IUI is around 500.

Infrastructure

The research and teaching infrastructure at the IUI includes "wet" and "dry" laboratories, pools and tanks fed by sea water, a wide variety of instrumentation, diving services, small self-operated boats and an adapted research vessel (about 24m) for deep sea work in the Gulf. In the year 2009 the IUI purchased its own vessel (the Sam Rothberg RV) that is optimally tailored, on a long range basis, to the research, teaching and monitoring activities of the Institute. A library, fully equipped with books (over 1000 volumes) and printed and electronic journals, serves faculty, students and visiting scientists.

While research and teaching have traditionally been the major concerns of the IUI, the past decade has witnessed a major shift of attention towards alarming ecological processes in the northern tip of the Aqaba-Eilat gulf. Accumulated data, collected by IUI researchers, have pointed at a severe deterioration of the coral reefs in Eilat in terms of amounts and variety of coral, fish and other marine species. Such alarming phenomena have been recently followed and quantified by the Israel–Jordan "Red Sea Marine Peace Park Program" and is currently on the agenda of both governments. Worried by the potential loss of unique marine ecosystems in this part of the world, with severe implications to the tourism economies of Eilat and Aqaba, two National Monitoring Programs for the Gulf have been established in both countries. On the Israeli side the program, sponsored and managed by the Ministry of the Environment, has been commissioned to the IUI. Its major scope is to understand the complex chemical, physical and biological processes in the sea, trying to identify and control the causes that lead to deterioration of marine life in the Gulf. Issues such as sewage treatment, marine fish farming, tourism and port activities, phosphate loading and oil spills are being studied using state-of-the-art monitoring and research methodologies. Read More…

Regional and International Cooperation

Regional cooperation in the marine sciences, between Israel, Egypt and Jordan, stemmed from the Aqaba Gulf marine ecosystem, with joint challenges in ecology and conservation, which is shared by the three neighboring countries. A pioneering program (the Red Sea Program) between Israel, Egypt and Germany operated in the late 1990ies, was sponsored by the German Ministry of Sciences.

It was followed (2000-2003) by the USAID-MERC sponsored program (the Red Sea Marine Peace Park – the RSMPP) in which Israel and Jordan cooperated in establishing the first systematic monitoring program in the Gulf of Aqaba-Eilat. In both cases IUI scientists closely collaborated with Arab researchers and managers, with partners in Jordan being the Aqaba Marine Science Station and the Aqaba Special Economic Zone administration. A concluding RSMPP binational science and management symposium was held in Aqaba in December 2003.

Ecology

While research and teaching have traditionally been the major concerns of the IUI, the past decade has witnessed a major shift of attention towards alarming ecological processes in the northern tip of the Aqaba-Eilat gulf. Accumulated data, collected by IUI researchers, have pointed at a severe deterioration of the coral reefs in Eilat in terms of amounts and variety of coral, fish and other marine species. Such alarming phenomena have been recently followed and quantified by the Israel -Jordan RSMPP activities, and are currently on the agenda of both governments. Worried by the potential loss of unique marine ecosystems in this part of the world, with severe implications to the tourism economies of Eilat and Aqaba, two National Monitoring Programs for the Gulf have been established in both countries. On the Israeli side the program, sponsored and managed by the Ministry of the Environment, has been commissioned to the IUI. Its major scope is to understand the complex chemical, physical and biological processes in the sea, trying to identify and control the causes that lead to deterioration of marine life in the Gulf. Issues such as sewage treatment, marine fish farming, tourism and port activities, phosphate loading and oil spills are being studied using state of the art monitoring and research methodologies.