Shira Yalon-Chamovitz

Shira Yalon-Chamovitz was born in 1962 in Jerusalem

Shira Yalon-Chamovitz was born in Jerusalem on November 8, 1962. Her mother, Yardena Yalon, taught ballet, and her father, Yaakov Yalon, made copper Judaica. She grew up in the Neve Sha'anan neighborhood, was active in the Scouts, and attended the Hebrew Gymnasium in Jerusalem.

In the IDF she served as a soldier teacher, working with new immigrants and with Israelis who could not read or write. She earned her bachelor's degree in occupational therapy in 1986 and her master's degree in 1992, both at Hadassah and the Hebrew University. She studied for a doctorate in educational psychology at the University of Connecticut from 1994 to 2000.

She taught at Tel Aviv University and founded the Department of Occupational Therapy at Ono Academic College, where she became Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences in 2023. She heads the Israel Institute on Cognitive Accessibility and coined the terms cognitive ramps and simultaneous simplification. She took part in writing Israeli accessibility rules that require plain language or language simplification.

After having COVID, she spoke publicly about long COVID and called for recognizing it as a disability. In 2026 she published a memoir about her cognitive rehabilitation and was appointed president of the Levinsky-Wingate Academic Center. She is married to Daniel Chamovitz, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and they have 3 children.