 Most of Hava's research focused on monitoring the levels of heavy metals, particularly mercury, in the ocean and in marine creatures in the Mediterranean Sea along the Israeli coast.In the late 1970s, she and Otto Oren measured high concentrations of mercury in fish from Haifa Bay, and sent the data to the Israeli Environmental Protection service, which was a branch of the Ministry of the Interior.Following this discovery, the government granted the IOLR $30,000 per year as part of the MEDPOL program for the monitoring of heavy metals along the Israeli Mediterranean coastline.