Talya Miron-Shatz
Talya Miron-Shatz (Hebrew: טליה מירון-שץ) is an Israeli researcher who specializes in medical decision-making. She is a full professor at the Ono Academic College, a senior fellow at the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, New York, and a visiting researcher at the Wonton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, Cambridge University. She has worked as a consultant in the healthcare industry to companies from health advertising, digital health, wellness, and the pharmaceutical industry. Biography. Miron-Shatz was awarded her PhD in psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2005 and conducted  her post-doctoral studies at the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University in the United States, under the supervision of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, until 2009. From 2008 to 2011, she was an adjunct lecturer and taught consumer behavior to students at the marketing department of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Miron-Shatz is currently a full professor at the Faculty of Business Administration at the Ono Academic College, where she is the founding director of the Center for Medical Decision Making. She is also a visiting researcher at the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication  at Cambridge University, England. Academics. The focus of Miron-Shatz's work is how people perceive medical information and medical situations, and the implications for their health. She explores this from several perspectives, starting with how probabilities are presented around Down syndrome, breast and prostate cancer, through how choice is made and how people decide on medical treatments, medication, and tests. She has studied shared decision making, women's regrets around birth, women's perception of their fertility chances, and many other aspects of the medical journey, such as thank-you letters to physicians. Based on her study of patient  knowledge of their own cardiac catherization, Miron-Shatz believes that inclusion in the process is important because "this translates into better adherence to medications and lifestyle changes." In a "New York Times" article on COVID vaccine hesitancy, she stated, "Covid has turned us all into amateur scientists... We are all looking at data, but most people are not scientists." Miron-Shatz has also studied happiness and its determinants, including financial security. Adding to the approach that placed considerable weight on daily activities as determinants of happiness, she has shown that individuals' thoughts and what they are preoccupied with also play  a major role in their happiness. She has revealed that subjectively defined peak, and mainly low moments during the day, add to the prediction of happiness. In a study of life satisfaction at milestone ages, based on surveys measuring well-being collected from 800 women in Columbus, Ohio, Miron-Shatz found that women at milestone ages (e.g., 30, 50) were twice as likely to assess their overall happiness in terms of self-reported health. Her research has been supported by a Marie Curie grant from the European Research Council, grants from the National Institute for Health Policy Research (Israel), The  American Association of University Women, FCB, Pfizer Israel, and Pfizer Europe. Writing. In 1990, Miron-Shatz published the book "My Body Is My Own: A Guide for Dealing with Child Sexual Assault". Since 2008, she writes the blog "Baffled by Numbers", about navigating information to reach better health decisions, published in "Psychology Today". She also publishes in other venues, such as the American Marketing Association. In September 2021, Miron-Shatz published her latest book, "Your Life Depends on It: What You Can Do to Make Better Choices About Your Health". Consulting career. Miron-Shatz consults in the sphere of medical  decision-making and behavior change in health, involving both prescriber and patient behavior. She mentored for Microsoft Ventures, was the co-organizer of the eHealth Venture Summit at MEDICA, the world's largest international medical device exhibition, and ran the Pharma 2.0 series in NYC's Health 2.0 meetup group. She has been a keynote speaker for Donate Life America. She routinely gives talks at medical industry conferences and for business forum events such as Habit Labs, NY; Digital Health Summit, Philadelphia; Financial Times Digital Health Summit Europe; and Financial Times Digital Health Summit, New York. Talya Miron-Shatz Talya