Anat
Arzi

Dr. Anat Arzi is a new faculty member in the Department of Medical Neurobiology and the Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Her research combines basic and clinical neuroscience to answer how we process the world under loss of consciousness.

Anat’s work focuses on two central unconscious states: natural loss of consciousness during sleep and pathologically altered consciousness following brain injuries. By recording diverse aspects of brain–body activity, her goal is to shed additional light on principles underlying the ability to process the world around us unconsciously. As an Azrieli Fellow, Anat will investigate the neurophysiological processes underlying consciousness recovery in patients with severe brain injuries and develop new methods to detect consciousness and predict recovery in brain-injured patients.

Anat completed her PhD in neurobiology in the lab of Prof. Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute of Science. During her doctoral studies she harnessed the unique characteristics of olfaction to study the processing, learning, and memory of unperceived stimuli in wakefulness and sleep and discovered that, in contrast to previous notions, humans can learn novel information during sleep. In her postdoctoral work, she pursued the investigation of unconscious brain abilities and limits in the labs of Prof. Tristan Bekinschtein at the University of Cambridge and Prof. Jacobo Sitt at the Paris Brain Institute. She developed an innovative approach for consciousness detection, demonstrating that olfactory sniffing can serve as a biomarker for consciousness recovery in brain-injured patients. Anat lives with her spouse, Gadi, and their daughter, Naomi, and enjoys poetry, French patisserie, and yoga.