This fellowship addresses the vital societal and educational challenge of preparing school students to successfully take part in the new knowledge society. The research component will examine students’ identities as knowledge builders as they study human body systems and climate change within fifth-grade classrooms designed as knowledge building communities. The objectives of the research address both theory and practice, aiming to (a) elucidate a conceptual framework on how boys' and girls' identities as knowledge builders grow over time; and (b) impact school implementation by articulating research-based design principles that enhance the development of students’ identities as knowledge builders. By introducing the notion of identity to knowledge building, I will bring together humanistic psychology and the learning sciences, leading to interdisciplinary advancements and practical knowledge about how to design sustainable learning communities using collaborative learning technologies. The outgoing and incoming phases of this fellowship entail close mentoring with two outstanding researchers, both of whom are directors of prestigious national research centres, to serve as supervisors. Together with formal training activities, the engagement of the supervisors in educational innovation created through research-practice partnerships will provide me with an ideal environment for my research goals to actualize. Aided by six short visits during the course of the fellowship with leading international scholars on knowledge building communities, I will create a consortium for European researcher-practice partnerships focused on implementing knowledge building communities, making a vital contribution to the 'Innovation Union'. Altogether, this fellowship will develop my career as an international leader in learning community research and design aiming to address a key societal and educational challenge of the innovation age.

People communicate emotions constantly. They express their emotions, intentionally and unintentionally, through their behaviour, language, and body; perceivers readily observe and interpret those expressions in others. These emotion communication dynamics are key to successful social interaction. The proposed project will capture these dynamics by adopting a panoramic, multi-modal approach to emotional communication: looking at how the same emotional experience is expressed in multiple streams (e.g., face-to-face and on social media), and is perceived by multiple observers (e.g., friends, romantic partners, and automated algorithms). This approach can go beyond existing research on emotion communication, which is stymied by attempts to isolate specific unimodal communication streams. The outgoing phase, which will take place at Princeton University, supervised by Prof. Diana Tamir, will use this integrated approach to examine whether the positive outcomes generally associated with emotional disclosure requires the disclosee to gain accurate understanding of the discloser’s emotions; to identify when different perceivers will be accurate vs. inaccurate; and to develop new algorithms for automated multi-modal emotion perception. The incoming phase, which will take place at the University of Haifa, supervised by Prof. Simone Shamay-Tsoory, will examine the neural mechanisms supporting the emotion communication processes studied in the outgoing phase. The project has the capacity to advance basic science in psychology, neuroscience and computer science, with multiple real world applications: distinguishing the roles of disclosure and accuracy, can help encourage healthy, beneficial disclosure; identifying relative strengths and weaknesses of communication modalities can help improve interpersonal accuracy, which can lead to better relationships; improved automated emotion assessment can help emotion research, clinical treatment, and emotion-aware software development.