Shelly Levy-Tzedek
Shelly Levy-Tzedek is an associate professor and the director of the Cognition, Aging & Rehabilitation Laboratory at Ben Gurion University.
Prof. Levy-Tzedek completed her undergraduate studies, summa cum laude, at UC Berkeley, where she won the Bioengineering departmental citation medal. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), she completed her M.S. and her Ph.D. degrees as an MIT Presidential Fellow and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute fellow, in the Biomedical Engineering department.
Chosen as one of Israel’s most promising 40-under-40 by The Marker Magazine for 2016, she also won the 2016 award from the Paedagogica Foundation’s special program entitled “Initiative for Excellence in the Negev”. In 2018, she won the Toronto Prize for excellence in research. In 2019 she participated in the Dagstuhl Seminar on Verification and Synthesis of Human-Robot Interaction. In the academic year 2018-19, Prof. Levy-Tzedek was a guest professor at the University of Freiburg in Germany as part of the Marie S. Curie FRIAS COFUND Fellowship Program, supported by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
She takes a multi-disciplinary approach to her studies, in which her lab team studies how to best employ robotics to facilitate a fast and efficient rehabilitation process (e.g., in stroke and in Parkinson’s disease), and the various ways in which interaction with social robots can help users (e.g., to reduce pain, or perform cognitive training).