The Team
Noga Tsur, PhD
Director
Dr. Noga Tsur is a senior lecturer (tenured) at the School of Social Work, Tel Aviv University. Dr. Tsur has completed her PhD at Tel Aviv University, where she studied the close link between awareness to bodily and emotional signals. She has conducted three postdoctoral fellowships: in Ben Gurion University, Tel Aviv University, and Harvard University.
Dr. Tsur’s research is situated within the conjunction of several bodies of knowledge, including child maltreatment, traumatic stress, and biopsychosocial models of mental and physical health. Through synthesizing these different, yet related, scopes, she aims to illuminate the complex and multifaceted implications of interpersonal trauma for bodily perceptions and acute and chronic pain.
In her research, she utilizes various research methodologies, including in-lab assessment of pain perception, dyadic evaluation of synchronization in heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV), self-report assessment, and systematic literature reviews.
Dr. Tsur has proposed and developed, together with her colleagues, the conceptualization of posttraumatic orientation to bodily signals. She invests much effort in uncovering the phenomenon of peritraumatic pain experiences and pain flashbacks as potentially relevant for explaining the risk of chronic pain following trauma. She also conducts interdisciplinary collaborations where she studies peritraumatic responses to child maltreatment, and abusive pain personification following child maltreatment.
Among her academic roles, Dr. Tsur serves on the editorial board of the Child Abuse & Neglect journal. Her main teaching topics include psychological trauma and trauma-informed care, family as a system, statistics, PhD-level advanced quantitative research methods, theory of social work practice. Her department roles include co-chairing the Equality and Diversity committee and serving as committee member in the undergraduate BSW and graduate MSW teaching committees.
Main interests:
-
Interpersonal trauma
-
Child maltreatment
-
Peritraumatic and posttraumatic pain (acute and chronic)
-
Posttraumatic orientation to bodily signals
-
Pain personification
-
Embodied empathy
-
Intergenerational processes of posttraumatic orientation to bodily signals
Ada Talmon
Lab Manager
PhD Candidate
As a Ph.D. candidate in the lab, my responsibilities include overseeing the data collection in the research groups of the master's students. I provide supervision and guidance throughout their thesis research, particularly in the areas of experimental design, data collection, and data analysis. In addition, I lead various research projects within the lab, which primarily center around intergenerational health and pain following trauma, embodied attachment, and the regulation of interpersonal space.
Shani Shaked
PhD Candidate
Research: Pain perception during and after tattooing, among individuals who have been exposed to interpersonal trauma.
Shani also conducts neurodivergent-affirming, gender-affirming & trauma-informed therapy.
Ira Stern
Masters Student
Research: The bodily experience following trauma as explained through memory processes.
Ira practices clinical social work and civil litigation and dispute resolution law.
Tamar Shabtai
Master's Student
Research: Bridging the empathy gap: Understanding parental bodily empathy in parents who were exposed to trauma.
Giora Ashkenazi
Master's Student
Research: Emasculating Trauma: The association between restrictive emotionality among trauma-exposed fathers and their sons.
Giora's academic interests span trauma, masculinity, mental health. Giora interned at a mental health institution that serves an alternative to psychiatric hospitalization and worked as a case manager in an outpatient mental health clinic for children and youth in the Tel Aviv area.
Gali Shilo
Master's Student
Research: Intergenerational Transmission of Pain Perception Following Childhood Trauma Among Parent-Offspring Dyads.
Gali works as a therapist at ״Ma׳ayan Center" - Multidisciplinary Therapy Center for Sexual Trauma
Oded Mazal
Master's Student
Research: Embodied Aggression: Revisiting the Correlation between Post-traumatic stress disorder and Aggressive Behavior through Body Awareness and Bodily Empathy
Yael Hollander
Master's Student
Research: Family relations and trauma: The mediating role of differentiation of the self in intimacy in parent-child relationship and family boundaries.
Noa Douek
Master's Student
Research: The relationship between child maltreatment and attuned self-care in adulthood. The mediating role of complex-ptsd and body awareness.
Rona Spigelman
Master's Student
Research: Child maltreatment and bodily empathy: The mediating role of CPTSD and self-differentiation.
Mor Sharabani
Master's Student
Research: The relationship between exposure to bullying and posttraumatic orientation to bodily signals: the moderating role of bodily parental empathy.
Yael Ginat
Master's Student
Research: The relationship between child maltreatment in parents and self-compassion among their children - The mediating role of bodily empathy.
Noy Adler
Master's Student
Research: Intergenerational transmission of eating disorders after child maltreatment: The mediating role of emotion regulation and dissociation.
Noa Ahronheim Schwartz
Master's Student
Research: The connection between attachment and bodily orientations: the role of bodily empathy as a mediative variable.
Coral Hakim
Master's Student
Research: The relationship between exposure to trauma and body regulation.
Vitali Goldring
Master's Student
Research: The relationship between post traumatic stress disorder and post traumatic body orientation: the role of self compassion.