Engineering faculty members Diego Gómez-Zará and Karla Badillo-Urquiola are this year’s grant recipients of the Jerusalem Research Development Grant. Their proposal builds on Notre Dame Jerusalem’s newly developed ADAM pre-college gap year program.
The ADAM pre-college program is for high school graduates of the greater Jerusalem area and is designed to strengthen their academic skills, help them gain fluency in foreign languages, and deepen their digital literacy through peer-to-peer education. ADAM’s first cohort will start in September, and thanks to the program’s partnership with Notre Dame’s Office of Pre-College Programs, students can earn college credits upon completion of the program.
Gómez-Zará and Badillo-Urquiola bring to the program their expertise in STEM topics, with Gómez-Zará specializing in data science and Badillo-Urquiola in human-computer interaction. Together, they will work with the Notre Dame Jerusalem team to help structure their contribution to the ADAM program, likely taking the form of a lecture and workshop for the students in their respective knowledge areas.
Gómez-Zará first connected with the Notre Dame Jerusalem team in 2023, when he visited Tantur to learn more about their work and opportunities for collaboration. In talking with the ND Jerusalem team, he learned that they were trying to bring faculty and students from Notre Dame’s engineering department to Jerusalem so they could support the ADAM program (then a coding course for young professionals) with computing courses. “I was very excited about the idea of connecting our department with students in Jerusalem,” Gómez-Zará shares. Their conversations paused when the war broke out, but once Badillo-Urquiola alerted Gómez-Zará to the Jerusalem Travel Research Grant posting, he knew it was the perfect opportunity to restart the discussion with the Jerusalem team.
While Gómez-Zará and Badillo-Urquiola plan to travel to Jerusalem in the upcoming year to engage with the students face-to-face, they also plan to support the program from campus as much as possible. Both emphasize the importance of building relationships with the students prior to going to Tantur. Additionally, they plan to assist the Jerusalem team in evaluating the program upon its completion.
Gómez-Zará expresses how their involvement in the ADAM program is not just an opportunity to teach students in Jerusalem—it’s also a chance to learn from them. “It’s a very unique context. And for a lot of the research that both Karla and I work on, most of the knowledge is based on the Western context. So it will be interesting to have this other perspective from students who are trying to enter STEM or be in jobs around computer science, and are facing these other challenges.”
For Badillo-Urquiola, the opportunity to work in and travel to the Holy Land is personal. “Jerusalem is the heart of Christianity and Judaism. Because I’m Catholic, I’m curious to learn about the history and connect with the people.” It’s also about the impact of the work they’re doing, and who is engaging with the program—youth who come from areas of crisis. “Being on the opposite side of the world, you see things on the news and you have these preconceptions of what something looks like, but unless you’re actually there, you don’t really know…And so if there’s any way that I can help make a difference, then I want to try and be part of that.”
Originally published at jerusalem.nd.edu by Jessie Carson on July 7, 2026.