Dr. Naama Kadmon Harpaz

Dr. Kadmon Harpaz earned her PhD in Life Sciences at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute of Science. She studies motor control, with a focus on the encoding of movement in the motor cortex. For her PhD, she studied the dynamics of neuronal populations and revealed principles of movement segmentation and movement invariances in complex arm motions. In the Dept. of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, Dr. Kadmon Harpaz plans to study the neural circuits and neural dynamics underlying motor learning. At Weizmann, she helped construct a comprehensive statistics course to familiarize students with often-used statistics, and excite them about “tedious” topics. Now it is a mandatory course for Life Sciences at Weizmann, taken by more than 100 students each year. Dr. Kadmon Harpaz also coordinated the scientific side of an interdisciplinary German-Israeli project that provides free dance lessons to people with Parkinson’s disease. She bridged between the dancers and the academic collaborators and helped construct the classes with a scientific point-of-view. She comments that she received more than she gave, both as a person and as a scientist, including unique insights on motor disorders and control strategies that have steered her research questions ever since.