Email: avitalavi@hotmail.com

Affiliation Faculty / Department: Occupational Therapy, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa

Academic Background:

PhD in Psychology at the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa. Postdoc at the Neurobiology Department at the Weizmann Institute. In 2012 joined the Technion to the Bruce Rappaport Faculty of Medicine as the head of the Behavioral Neuroscience lab. In 2021 joined the department of Occupational Therapy at the University of Haifa as an associate professor and head of Behavioral Neurobiology lab.

Research Interests: Avi’s translational research focuses on sensory (e.g., auditory and olfactory), emotional (e.g., anxiety and enriched environment), attentional (e.g., selective and sustained attention) and social (e.g., social cooperation and interaction) dysregulations, in health and disease. He uses basic science and applied animal models, both giving rise to investigations in human beings, in which neurophysiological manifestations are correlated with daily behaviours and functions. Attempting to untangle the mechanism of attentional and emotional dysregulations, Avi has been integrating diverse research paradigms, including behavioural, pharmacological, genetic, molecular, and neural plasticity. These efforts wrapped with multidisciplinary technological approach and have yielded extensive translational research, leading to the development of a physiological tool for non-invasive measurement of both emotional and attention dysregulations in humans (‘Mindtension’), already implemented in several studies.

Home Page URL: https://Sites.google.com/welfare.haifa.ac.il/bnl