We reached out the Vice-President of the Research in TAU on the Postdocs Scholarship issue

 In these days, as we wrote before, we sent out a letter to Dan Peer, the Vice president of Research and development in TAU.

The letter is an introductory explanation of the demands the postdocs came up with. Our goal is to meet with Dan Peer or someone of his same caliber.

In the first place, he answered us that he is willing to follow up our campaign and proposed us to talk directly with Prof. Milette Shamir (Vice President of Tel Aviv University, in charge of international academic collaboration).

Possibly, Milette will be our interface, but we are waiting for her response as apparently she is out of office for now.

Today morning (09.07) we had an update from Dan, as it follows:

"Dear all,

I have spoken to VP international and TAU CEO.

We agree with you that changes need to be occurring in the fellowships scale (the basal level should change) and it will happen in the near future. I hope that in the next few weeks you will get more info about these changes for the new academic year.

I want to add that currently there are no restrictions on PIs to pay 225% fellowship for postdocs without any problem pending they have the funding to do so. If the PI is interested and have funding the fellowships can be even increased up to 300% with special approval of TAU Rector.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

I hope to come with good news in the next few weeks."

This is half of good news: the management of TAU is aware of the situation (especially for the postdocs) and they are willing to re-adjust the basal level of the fellowship, the one that comes from the university funds.

What we are not happy with is that we are still in need to talk with one of the vice presidents in person and that the issue is about the University part of the scholarship. PIs have their own funds and everyone of us (master/PhD/postdocs) is allowed to have a personal meeting and ask the PI more money. But this mechanism is elective, it is not general and many of us would not be able to get the increase.

We are now thinking about the next steps in this direction, especially because there information provided is very general and there is no mention of the compensation for the CPI for the postdocs, since many of them won't be here for the next semester.

We got a milestone, but we don't see the finishing line yet. Stay tuned for the next piece of news!