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Director: Professor Shaul Hochstein
Professor Shaul Hochstein was elected Director of the Institute of Psychobiology beginning Summer 2002. He follows the successful leadership of Professors Amiram Carmon, Moshe Abeles and Bernard Lerer. Upon accepting the position, he said, "It is a daunting challenge, at the dawn of this 21st century - certain to be the century . of the brain - to head the National Institute, which strives to promote Israel's basic and applied research in Psychobiology. We are just beginning to understand the basic principles of physiology and neurobiology, biochemistry and genetics, psychology and psychiatry that underlie mental phenomenology, perception, behavior, and neurological and affective disease. We must continue to support work seeking new avenues of treatment and prevention of mental disorders, while not abandoning studies of basic mechanisms, which enrich our understanding and enable further progress."
Prof. Hochstein is not new to the Institute. Early in his career, he was awarded a Psychobiology Young Investigator Grant and later its prestigious extended grant on memory and learning. He directed the Smith Family Laboratory for Collaborative Research in Psychobiology since its inception over 10 years ago, and serves on the Institute's Scientific Advisory Board.
Born in New York, Shaul immigrated to Israel in 1965. He is married to Annette Reinhold-Hochstein. Their daughters, Avital and Naama, are graduate students at the Hebrew University.
Prof. Hochstein chairs the Hebrew University's Program in Brain & Behavior, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Inter-disciplinary Center for Neural Computation. He has worked at Rockefeller University and M.I.T..
Studies at Prof. Hochstein's laboratory has spanned the spectrum of vision research, from transduction biophysics and processing physiology to the psychophysics of perceptual learning and memory. Current interests include neural network encoding of stimulus features and sequence order, cortical mechanisms of perceptual learning, categorization, and the rapid visual encoding of a high-level representation of the perceptual world.
Among his volunteer activities, Prof. Hochstein is board member of Tsad Kadima - supporting Conductive Education for children with cerebral palsy, and of the Jerusalem College of Technology. He is also founder of Havruta, a daily Bet Midrash for university students.