The Cognition, Aging and Rehabilitation Lab

Short Bio - Prof. Shelly Levy-Tzedek

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

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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.

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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. In 2024, she gave a keynote address in the IEEE RO-MAN conference.

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Her work is supported by several grants from various sources, including the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF), The Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH), The Israeli National Insurance Institute, the British Rosetrees Trust, the Swedish Promobilia rehabilitation foundation, and the Leir, Bronfman, Borten, Bergida and CAAF foundations in the US.

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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 and psychology, and she collaborates 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.

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

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