Bi-National Academic Funding and Collaboration Dynamics: The Case of the German-Israeli Foundation

Academic grant programs are widely used to motivate international research collaboration and boost scientific impact across borders. Among these, bi-national funding schemes -- pairing researchers from just two designated countries - are common yet understudied compared with national and multinational funding. In this study, we explore whether bi-national programs genuinely foster new collaborations, high-quality research, and lasting partnerships. To this end, we conducted a bibliometric case study of the German-Israeli Foundation (GIF), covering 642 grants, 2,386 researchers, and 52,847 publications. Our results show that GIF funding catalyzes collaboration during, and even slightly before, the grant period, but rarely produces long-lasting partnerships that persist once the funding concludes. By tracing co-authorship before, during, and after the funding period, clustering collaboration trajectories with temporally-aware K-means, and predicting cluster membership with ML models (best: XGBoost, 74% accuracy), we find that 45% of teams with no prior joint work become active while funded, yet activity declines symmetrically post-award; roughly one-third sustain collaboration longer-term, and a small subset achieve high, lasting output. Moreover, there is no clear pattern in the scientometrics of the team's operating as a predictor for long-term collaboration before the grant. This refines prior assumptions that international funding generally forges enduring networks. The results suggest policy levers such as sequential funding, institutional anchoring (centers, shared infrastructure, mobility), and incentives favoring genuinely new pairings have the potential to convert short-term boosts into resilient scientific bridges and inform the design of bi-national science diplomacy instruments.