Shelly Levy-Tzedek

Dr. Shelly Levy-Tzedek is the head of the Cognition, Aging & Rehabilitation Laboratory at the Ben Gurion University. She is a faculty member at the Physical Therapy Department, a member of the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience and of the ABC Robotics initiative at the university.

Dr. 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.

She was recently chosen as one of Israel’s most promising 40-under-40 by The Marker Magazine for 2016, won the 2016 award from the Paedagogica Foundation’s special program entitled “Initiative for Excellence in the Negev”, and won the 2018 Toronto Prize for excellence in research. In the academic year 2018-19, she was a Marie S. Curie FRIAS COFUND Fellow at FRIAS, supported by the European Union through the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Her work is supported by several grants from various sources, including the ISF (Israeli Science Foundation), the Swedish Promobilia rehabilitation foundation, the British Rosetrees Foundation, and the Borten and the CAAF foundations in the US.

Her lab studies the effects of age and disease (in particular, Parkinson’s disease & stroke) on the control of body movement, and how to best employ robotics to facilitate a fast and efficient rehabilitation process. She takes a multi-disciplinary approach to her studies: the students on her team come from varied backgrounds, including physical therapy, engineering, psychology, and medicine, and she has been collaborating with faculty members from Israel, Canada, England, the United States and Germany who come from diverse fields such as Industrial Engineering, Psychology, Computer Science, Robotics, Education and Philosophy.