Eli Vakil

Eli Vakil was born in 1953 in Tunisia

Eli Vakil was born in Tunisia in 1953 and came to Israel with his parents as a small child. He attended the Moreshet elementary school in Mevaseret Yerushalayim and the Himmelfarb high school in Jerusalem. He then studied for a year at the Shaalvim yeshiva.

He served in the IDF as a combat medic in the Nahal. He earned a B.A. in psychology at Bar-Ilan University. In 1976 he married Tamar, and in 1978 the couple went to Sydney as emissaries of the Jewish Agency and Bnei Akiva.

He completed a Ph.D. in clinical neuropsychology at the City University of New York in 1985. He worked in head injury rehabilitation at the Rusk Institute in New York, then at the Recanati National Institute in Israel. From 2005 to 2021 he directed a rehabilitation program in Jaffa for veterans with traumatic brain injury.

In 1987 he joined the psychology department at Bar-Ilan University, which he later chaired. He heads the Memory and Amnesia Lab at the Gonda Brain Research Center and studies memory in brain injury patients, Parkinson's patients and the elderly. He is a founding member of the Israeli Neuropsychological Society and served on the board of the International Neuropsychological Society.

He lives in Ra'anana with his wife Tamar, and they have 3 children.