Prof. Rony Paz

Rony Paz completed a BSc in Mathematics and a BA in Philosophy at the Hebrew University and did his PhD in computational electrophysiology examining the neural mechanisms that underlie learning and generalization of visuomotor skills. After a postdoc at Rutgers University examining the neural mechanisms in the Amygdala that enable emotional learning, he started his lab at the Weizmann Institute in 2008 focusing on the neural mechanisms that underlie affective learning. The lab studies the primate amygdala-PFC circuits. He explored the mechanisms that underlie delayed extinction, overgeneralization, exploration-exploitation trade-off, and social interactions. His studies focus on why reward-based (appetitive) learning differs from punishment-based (aversive) learning. They combine behavioral studies, computational approaches, electrophysiology, fMRI, and stimulation. They combine physiological experiments in both non-human and human primates. The overarching goal is to understand the neural codes that underlie affective learning, and how maladaptive processes in these networks lead to pathologies.