Avraham Avital is currently an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of medicine at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and vice director of research authority in the Emek Medical Center. As a Ph.D student with Prof. Gal Richter-Levin, they discovered the effects of exposure to juvenile stress on emotional and cognitive coping abilities in adulthood. He then moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science and together with Prof. Menahem Segal, he continued his research on stress and found the unique role of mineralo- and Gluco-corticoid system in the mechanism of neural plasticity following stress. Starting his interest in translational neuroscience, he also studied and found blood markers for the severity of Schizophrenia symptoms. After joining the Technion and Emek medical Center, he has established the Behavioral Neuroscience lab. Since then he has been investigating the regulation and dysregulation of attention and social cooperation processes in health and disease, combining state-of-the-art behavioral technologies with molecular and physiological tools. During these studies he has developed a fully computerized social cooperation maze, currently enabling to decipher the genetics of social cooperation and also subserving a groundbreaking collaborative research on the dysregulation of sociability in Autism (with Prof. Alejandro Sosnik and Prof. Herman Wolosker). His ongoing translational research on attention dysregulation has led to a newly EMG-based instrument (patent reg. #63524) and the establishment of a startup company (Mindtension, ltd) that further the R&D and implementing this technology to better diagnose and treat ADHD, ‘circumstantial’ ADHD (e.g. medical residents and combat pilots, following workload), and the involvement of the attention system in stress (i.e. PTSD). Avital’s research along the years has been extensively funded by the Israeli ministry of defense, US army/NIH and the ISF.
Avraham (Avi) Avital, Ph.D
Behavioral Neuroscience lab, Gutwirth Building.
Department of Neuroscience, Rappaort Faculty of Medicine and Emek medical center.
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology,Technion City, Haifa 32000, Israel.
E-mail: Avital@technion.ac.il; Avitalavi@hotmail.com
Lab manager: Dr. Shlomit Aga-Mizrachi, e mail: shlomit.mizrachi@gmail.com
Lab: +972-77-8871394
Office: +972-77-8872225/+972-4-6495395
Cell: +972-50-6503361
Website: https://bnl.net.technion.ac.il/