I study how people allocate effort over time — why motivation rises near deadlines, how mood shapes persistence, and how a sense of control keeps people engaged. My work combines behavioral experiments, computational modeling (reinforcement learning, Bayesian and mixed-effects models), neuroscience methods, and longitudinal data from platforms with millions of users.

I’ve published 16 peer-reviewed papers (500+ citations) in journals including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Cognition, eLife and Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, with three more under review. I was a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University (with Ross Otto) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (with Eran Eldar), after a PhD at Tel Aviv University with Nira Liberman and Israel Halperin.

I’ve mentored 24 student researchers across three universities, guest-lectured graduate courses in research methods and human motivation, and review for JPSP and JEP: General. My work follows open-science practice: preregistration, open data and open materials.

Current directions: affect and effort near deadlines, controllability and task persistence, and patterns of long-term task engagement in large language models.

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