Miri Cohen (University of Haifa) – Welfare and Social Work
Miri Cohen, Ph.D. is Professor and the head of the School of Social Work, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, University of Haifa. Received BSW in Social Work from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel in 1973 and MSW from Haifa University in 1986. Received her PhD in 2000 from the Faculty of Medicine, the Technion, Israel in the area of psycho-neuro-immunology. Between the years 2006- March 2012 she served as the head of the Gerontology Department.
Miri is the president of the Israel Psycho-Oncology Society, a board member of the Israeli Oncology Council, a board member of the Journals Psycho-Oncology and The journal of Research in Social Work Practice and a former Associate Editor of Quality of Life Research.
Her main area of research is coping with stress and trauma. This includes the study of coping and adjustment to various acute and chronic stressors, such as life-threatening illness, terror attacks and war, accidents, older people coping with the early trauma of the Holocaust. In these studies she focuses on the multicultural aspects of coping as well as physiological markers of stress (e.g., immune functions, inflammation, heart rate variability). A related topic of her research is the functioning of hospital social workers in emergency, including preparedness of social workers in hospitals, family support and victim identification in mass casualty terrorist attacks, compassion fatigue and burnout in hospital social workers.
Miri Cohen published more than ninety papers in refereed journals and several books and chapters in edited books. Many of her papers have been published in leading journals such as Journal of Trauma and Stress, Cancer, Breast Cancer Research and Therapy, International Journal of cancer, Psycho-Oncology, Journal of the Geriatric American Association, Gerontologist.