About | levy-tzedek-lab

Short Bio - Prof. Shelly Levy-Tzedek

Shelly Levy-Tzedek is the director of the Cognition, Aging & Rehabilitation Laboratory at Ben-Gurion University. She is an associate professor at the Physical Therapy Department, a member of the School of Brain Sciences and Cognition, and of the ABC Robotics initiative at the 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.

She was chosen as one of Israel's most promising 40-under-40 by The Marker Magazine, won an award from the Paedagogica Foundation's special program entitled "Initiative for Excellence in the Negev", and 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. In 2023 she was a visiting scholar at KTH's Digital Futures center, and in 2024, she gave a keynote address at the IEEE RO-MAN conference.

Her work is supported by several grants from various sources, including the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF), The Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH), the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), and the National Insurance Institute, the British Rosetrees Trust, the Swedish Promobilia rehabilitation foundation, and the Leir, Bronfman, Borten, Bergida and 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. In recent years, she has been co-leading a global initiative to promote regulation of social robots for vulnerable populations. She takes a multi-disciplinary approach to her studies: the students on her team come from varied backgrounds, including physical therapy, engineering and psychology, and she collaborates with colleagues from Israel, Canada, the UK, the United States, Germany and Sweden who come from diverse fields such as Industrial Engineering, Psychology, Computer Science, Robotics, Education and Philosophy.

Here is a short video presentation from a recent Board of Trustees event at Ben-Gurion University: