Center for Healthy Minds

Amit’s research is guided by the idea that by better observing minds, we can better heal hearts. Indeed, the way we look in and interact with our inner mental life can either fuel suffering or unlock our innate capacity to heal and thrive. Accordingly, his Observing Minds Lab group has explored the more and less adaptive ways that we process, relate to, and respond to our internal states, such as our thoughts, physical sensations, and emotions. Though the Looking In Project, Amit has developed novel theory, measurement methods, and therapeutic tools in order to advance the science of internally-directed cognition in mental health. Amit has also worked to translate these insights, to help buffer the toxicity of social adversity and facilitate healing among forcibly displaced communities and survivors of conflict and collective trauma. Through the Moments of Refuge Project, Amit’s group has pioneered novel trauma-sensitive mindfulness- and compassion-based therapeutics through an inter-disciplinary, inter-cultural and community-based mobile laboratory embedded in post-displacement communities.

Amit recently joined the Center for Healthy Minds, and will begin a new appointment as a Professor of Counseling Psychology at UW-Madison in the Fall of 2025. Amit began his career in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Haifa, where he has served as a Professor of Clinical Psychology and Director of the Observing Minds Lab. An alumnus of the Israel Young Academy of the Israel National Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Amit completed a BA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a PhD in clinical psychology at the University of Vermont, a clinical internship at the Palo Alto VA, and a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Palo Alto VA Center for Health Care Evaluation.