Ayala Hendin

Ayala Hendin, PhD, an Israel Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, is passionate about connecting research, policy and practice. She teaches and conducts research on Israeli politics, policy and society, specifically within the higher education system. She completed her PhD at Ben-Gurion University (2021) and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University (2021/22).

Hendin was the founding director of “Israeli Hope in Academia,” a flagship national program of Israel’s 10th President, Reuven Rivlin. She led several higher education policy consultancies for the Israeli Council for Higher Education, the Israeli Ministry of Regional Cooperation, and various Israeli universities and colleges. She is currently researching equality traps in higher education policies toward ethnic, national, and religious minorities, and the impacts of October 7th and the subsequent war on Israel's higher education internationalization agenda.