Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students
The Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students is a Tel Aviv University program for fostering excellence, leading to a Master's degree. Only 15 students are admitted to the program every year. "The highly competitive selection is based on applicants’ scores in the Israeli Standardized Matriculation and Psychometric exams, a short essay, a personal interview, and a concourse examination. Thus, the students participating in the program have outstanding intellectual potential and are motivated and capable of hard work and independent thinking." The program was established in 1985 by Prof. Yehuda Elkana, to  enable exceptionally gifted students to explore and conduct interdisciplinary research. Elkana led the program for nine years, until 1994. In 1995 the program was named after the late Adi Lautman, an alumnus of the program and the son of Israeli industrialist and businessman . The current head of the program is Prof. Lilach Hadany, an alumna of the program. According to , a former head of the program, "the world is going toward questions and research that simply cannot be done from within only one discipline [...] Today, big questions can be answered either by collaborations between researchers from various disciplines [...] or  by a researcher who has strong bases in several disciplines. Either you can work together or you yourself should be interdisciplinary.”