Prof. Dov Shmotkin

Dov Shmotkin is Professor Emeritus and former head of the Herczeg Institute on Aging, both at Tel Aviv University. He received his PhD from Tel Aviv University. He is a senior clinical psychologist and formerly the head of the clinical psychology graduate program in the School of Psychological Sciences. He was Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Honorary Fellow in the Institute on Aging at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. He was elected as Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America.

Dov Shmotkin conducts research that designs an integrated theory on the pursuit of happiness in the face of adversity. This work expands his studies on well-being across the life span, as well as on long-term traumatic effects among Holocaust survivors and older adults at large. His studies in this area examine interrelations of biographical experiences e.g., (trauma), time perspective, and self-conception systems (e.g., subjective well-being, meaning in life, the hostile-world scenario). He has been engaged in gerontological research on developmental and aging processes along adulthood and late life, focusing on outcomes of physical and mental health. He has served in leading research roles in nationwide studies on the Israeli older population, including the Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Aging Study (CALAS) and the Israeli branch of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). His research has largely addressed adaptation to aging among particular sub-populations that faced life adversities, including trauma survivors, persons in very old age, minorities of sexual orientation, and bereaved parents.