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The Team
Prof. Tom Schonberg
Principal Investigator | Dept. of Neurobiology
My laboratory is focused on the study of the neural basis of value-based decision-making and behavior change. We are interested in the process of how values are constructed by the brain, and thus could be perturbed and changed. We study the underlying neural substrates of multiple components of this process by designing novel behavioral paradigms and using converging research tools to analyze them including structural and functional MRI, eye tracking, virtual reality and computational value-based decision-making models. I am the director of the Minerva center for the study of human intelligence in immersive, augmented and mixed realities. My training has always been interdisciplinary and I nurture this spirt in my laboratory and beyond. My laboratory is committed to promoting open, transparent, and reproducible scientific practices and thus all our studies are preregistered, all research articles are submitted as pre-prints alongside the submission to a peer reviewed journal, we share all of our task, analysis codes and data. We have also been pioneers with the registered-report format.
Maya Bar Or
Ph.D. student | Sagol School of Neuroscience
In 2020 I graduated my M.A in Psychology from Haifa University where I studied the neural circuits of goal-directed and habitual behavior. I joined the Ph.D. program of Sagol School of Neuroscience in 2021. Here, I hope to continue exploring goal-directed and habitual behaviors and related pathologies, and further understand their neural mechanisms.
Masha Khlopovsky
M.Sc. student | Dept. of Neurobiology
The first degree I obtained was a 5-year degree in linguistics at Moscow State Linguistic University back in 2013. In 2017 I moved to Israel, and in 2018 I joined the B.Sc. program in biomedical sciences with the focus on neurobiology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2019 till 2021 I worked as a B.Sc. researcher at Adi Inbals lab, that dedicated itself to retinal development. In 2021 I started M.Sc. program in neurobiology at Tel-Aviv University and joined our lab. My project is “located” at the intersection of neurobiology and linguistics. I am trying to understand the neural mechanism and pattern of unsatisfied verbal expectation with the help of pupillometry. In other words, I am studying what happens to your nervous system when instead of hearing what you expected, you hear what you did not.
Yehuda Bergstein
M.Sc. | Data Scientist | Dept. of Neurobiology
I obtained my B.Sc in Biotechnology from TAU in 2022. Finished my M.Sc in the Neurobiology and Behavioral Neuroscience track, participating in a joint project in Prof. Tom Schonberg and Prof. Pablo Blinder's laboratories, involving the study of exploratory and learning behaviors. Our study is being conducted through the utilization of a large spatial task (i.e maze) with humans and mice.
Adi Cantor
Ph.D student | Sagol School of Neuroscience
I am currently pursuing an M.Sc. at Tel Aviv University, after completing my B.Sc in Biology.
My research focuses on investigating the underlying mechanisms of Cue Approach Training (CAT), particularly how attention and memory influence preference changes.
Oren Kobo
Ph.D. | Research Scientist
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Shannon Adler
M.Sc. student | Sagol School of Neuroscience
I am an MSc student in Neuroscience with a BSc in Statistics and Data Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research is focused on modelling clinical decision-making with LLMs.
Shannon Adler