I’m an Associate Professor with tenure at the Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo. I’m also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychology at the Psychiatry Department of the University of Michigan. My research program revolves around my clinical experience. I'm a licensed supervising clinical psychologist as well as a lecturer of clinical practice courses. I see my professional work as a clinical psychologist, teacher, and researcher activities as sustaining and nurturing each other.

My research interests are in the process of transition to parenthood underscoring childbirth PTSD and bonding. In the past years, I have broadened my research focus to include processes occurring pre-partum, in the delivery itself, and post-partum. I have a particular interest in studying factors affecting post-partum bonding, attachment, and sleep and I have made several contributions to the field by advancing the knowledge of the ways in which childbirth PTSD as measured and conceptualized as a specific kind of trauma is associated with bonding with the infant and parenthood. Specifically, I have shown in my studies the possibility that the specific childbirth-related PTSD symptoms may have a different effect on parenting variables than the general PTSD symptoms following childbirth. My other contribution to this field is describing the mediation processes in which underlying personality structures such as attachment styles, neuroticism, and optimism may affect bonding and other parenting variables through postpartum psychopathology.

In my studies, I try to describe longitudinal trajectories of how pre-partum period factors such as personality, psychopathology, and fear of childbirth interact with the birth process and post-partum factors. I’m interested in how subjective childbirth experience is affected by prepartum factors as well as affecting postpartum variables, such as psychopathology (mainly postpartum depression and PTSD), sleep, breastfeeding, and bonding to the infant (as well as mother-father-infant interaction variables).