Ziv Ben-Zion, PhD

Ziv Ben-Zion is a clinical neuroscientist studying why some people recover from traumatic events while others do not. He is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, and Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) at the School of Public Health, University of Haifa, where he directs the Ben-Zion Resilience and Recovery Lab.

His research combines longitudinal cohort studies, neuroimaging, physiology, and computational modeling to identify early markers of risk and resilience. Working with recent trauma survivors, he has shown that neural responsivity to reward and punishment, hippocampal and amygdala structure, and whole-brain connectivity measured within weeks of a traumatic event predict who goes on to develop PTSD, and that two symptom dimensions long treated as one, fear and emotional pain, map onto separable neural signatures. He currently leads STRONG (Stress and Trauma Resilience: Opportunities for National Growth), a national longitudinal study of risk, resilience, and recovery under prolonged collective trauma in Israel.

A second line of work asks how artificial intelligence (AI) systems behave in mental health contexts. He has shown that large language models (LLMs) exposed to traumatic narratives exhibit elevated "state anxiety" that shifts their subsequent outputs, which carries into human-like biases in agentic decision-making, and that widely used conversational agents can execute harm-enabling actions during simulated psychiatric crises. These findings inform his work on safeguards for emotionally responsive AI.

Ben-Zion completed a direct-track PhD in Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University and Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center with Prof. Talma Hendler, and trained as a Fulbright postdoctoral scholar at Yale with Prof. Ifat Levy and Prof. Ilan Harpaz-Rotem. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers, more than half as first or senior author, in journals including Nature, The American Journal of Psychiatry, Molecular Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, Annual Review of Psychology and npj Digital Medicine. His research program is supported by a five-year Israel Science Foundation (ISF) Beresheet grant as principal investigator, which funds the STRONG study.

His work has been recognized with the ECNP Rising Star Award of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP), the Bela and Chaim Danieli Early Career Professional Award of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), the Alon Scholarship of the Israeli Council for Higher Education (CHE), and the Career Development Leadership Award of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), and he was named to Israel's Globes 40 Under 40 list in 2026. He also writes for general audiences, including two single-author pieces in Nature on the need for safeguards on emotionally responsive AI, and his research has been covered by The New York Times, NPR, Fortune, TechCrunch and more.