Born in Tel-Aviv, 1952, married to Revital Attia, 4 kids (Lottem, Marva, Ream and Tsufit) Completed MD-Ph.D. studies at the faculty of medicine, Technion, Haifa, 1984. My first post-doctoral fellowship (1984-1987), under the supervision of Moshe Abeles of the Hebrew university, was devoted to the study of neural interactions in the frontal cortex of behaving monkeys. During that period I learned the methods of recording and analysis of simultaneous multiple neuron activity.

I started to look into basal ganglia physiology and the pathophysiological mechanisms of Parkinson's disease in 1988, during my post-doctoral fellowship with Mahlon DeLong at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, USA (1987-1990). Here, in the Department of Physiology of the Hebrew university – Hadassah medical school, Jerusalem, I was able to combine the two different domains of my post-doctoral fellowships. Since 1990, I am employing combined behavioral, multi-electrode physiological and computational approaches to probe the relations between the basal ganglia - cortex networks and normal and pathological behavior. We are recording the simultaneous activity of several neurons in different structures of the basal ganglia of monkeys that are engaged in the performance of behavioral tasks that involve visual perception, probabilistic decision making and motor action. Moreover, we were able to study the neural activity following the induction of Parkinson’s disease (with the MPTP neurotoxin) and following dopamine induced dyskinesia, both in the MPTP and control (MPTP-naïve) monkeys.
 

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