Dr. Shachar Maidenbaum

I grew up in Haifa, deeply loving the forest, the ocean and mountain (and I expect to now add the desert…). After high school I spent several years at Har Etzion Yeshiva, and then I enlisted in the IDF Intelligence Corps (Captain Res.). After finishing my army service, I moved to Jerusalem, where I studied computer science and computational biology at the Hebrew University, in the “Amirim" Program. I then went on to study medical neurobiology for my master's and PhD, under the supervision of Prof. Amir Amedi.

While I was working in Prof. Amedi's lab as a graduate student, I developed a technology to help blind and visually impaired users, and during my doctoral research I used the devices I developed to study non-visual spatial perception and its neurological basis.

I completed my postdoc at Columbia University in NY, in the lab of Josh Jacobs, where I studied spatial memory of real and virtual worlds among healthy people and epilepsy patients, and focused on the neurological foundations of directional representations.

As people we live in space. I have been interested since childhood in how we know where we are, how we remember where we left our things, and how we find our way back to them. My research focuses on trying to understand how people execute these tasks, and how spatial data is represented in our brains. Based on the answers to these questions, at my new lab, we will try to create tools that will help people who are challenged in terms of spatial orientation or spatial memory.

My research also involves broader spatial issues: How we perceive real space as opposed to virtual and augmented space; how the brain's representations in the real world differ from those in a laboratory environment; how we use our spatial thinking to represent additional spaces, such as time or social spaces. 

I have three small children, so who has time for anything else? 😊

But, beyond my role as a father and partner, I am a man of nature who needs open spaces, a man of information who is addicted to knowledge and to understanding what is going on in the wider world today and in the past, and a man of fictional spaces who loves to write and create them.

As a child I thought I would become an archaeologist and spent my summers as a volunteer on digs all over the country. Today I would say that I hope to be a good man, to be a good father. And that I hope to succeed in being a person who makes those around him and the world around him better.