Eitan Schechtman

•Assistant Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior

•Fellow, Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

Biography

Eitan Schechtman, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior and a Fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in Neural Computation from the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2017, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. His research focuses on memory consolidation during sleep, particularly examining how encoding context influences memory reactivation and how multiple interconnected memories are processed during sleep.

Schechtman has received several research awards, including an NSF CAREER award and a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence award from NIMH. He was named an APS Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science in 2023. His postdoctoral work was supported by a Human Frontier Science Program fellowship and a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholarship.

Schechtman has published over 30 peer-reviewed articles in journals including PNAS, Cell Reports, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Annual Review of Psychology, and the Journal of Neuroscience. He has organized multiple international workshops on sleep reactivation and served as an ad hoc reviewer for NIH and NSF grant panels. He teaches courses on memory and the human brain at UC Irvine and is involved in science outreach programs connecting researchers with students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Education

PhD in Neural Computation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2017
BA in Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2010

Distinctions

Rising Star, Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 2026
Rising Star, Association for Psychological Science, 2023
HFSP (Human Frontier Science Program) postdoctoral fellowship, 2017-2020
Zuckerman Postdoctoral Scholarship, 2017-2019
Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities' Adams fellowship, 2013-2016

Areas of Expertise

Cognitive Neuroscience
Learning & Memory
Sleep
EEG
Memory Reactivation
Affective Neuroscience
Multivariate Pattern Analyses

Recent Publications

Aquino Argueta, S., Lazarus A., Yao F., Taylor C., Shanahan L.K., Norman K.A., Davachi L., Kahnt T., Paller K.A., Schechtman E., “Reactivation during sleep segregates the neural representations of episodic memories” (opens in new tab), bioRxiv, 2026.
Lin X., Lew N.J., Cho M., Paller K.A., Schechtman E., “Depression symptoms are associated with affective neural processing during sleep and rest” (opens in new tab), bioRxiv, 2026.
Morakabati N.R., Thiha A.S., Schechtman E. , “EEG-based classification models reveal differential neural processing of words and images” (opens in new tab), Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 436, pp. 110883, 2026.
Lu T., Tompary A., Schechtman E., “No evidence for sleep-dependent memory generalization in a large online sample” (opens in new tab), Learning and Memory, vol. 33, no. 6-7, pp. a054219, 2026.
Tal A., Schechtman E., “Awake reactivation is not a uniform process” (opens in new tab), Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol. 29, pp. 876-878, 2025.
Tal A., Schechtman E., Caughran B., Paller K.A., Davachi L., “The reach of reactivation: Effects of consciously triggered versus unconsciously triggered reactivation of associative memory” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 121, no. 10, pp. e2313604121, 2024.
Antony J.W., Schechtman E., “Reap while you sleep: consolidation of memories differs by how they were sown” (opens in new tab), Hippocampus, vol. 33, pp. 1-14, 2023.

Most Cited Publications

Paller K.A., Creery J.D., Schechtman E., “Memory and sleep: How sleep cognition can change the waking mind for the better” (opens in new tab), Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 72, pp. 123-150, 2021.
Schechtman E., Antony J.W., Lampe A., Wilson B., Norman K.A., Paller K.A., “Multiple memories can be simultaneously reactivated during sleep as effectively as a single memory” (opens in new tab), Communications Biology, vol. 4, no. 25, 2021.
Schechtman E., Heilberg J., Paller K.A., “Memory consolidation during sleep involves context reinstatement” (opens in new tab), Cell Reports, vol. 42, no. 4, pp. 112331, 2023.

Contact Information

Website: https://sleep.bio.uci.edu

Email: eitans@uci.edu

Address: 1430 Biological Sciences III, Irvine, CA 92697-4550

This profile was created with the help of AI.

Last updated on 10/5/2026.