Merav Sabri, Ph.D.

Program Director, Basic and Mechanistic Research in Complementary and Integrative Health Branch

Division of Extramural Research

Phone: 301-496-2583

E-Mail: merav.sabri@nih.gov

Merav Sabri, Ph.D., joined the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), Basic and Mechanistic Research Branch, as a program director in 2017. Dr. Sabri is also the coordinator for NCCIH small business research programs.

Dr. Sabri’s portfolio includes research and training programs on fundamental and translational science related to force-based manipulations/manual therapies (e.g., chiropractic, massage), technology and methodology development for mind and body approaches, emotional well-being, addiction, science of behavioral change, and SBIR/STTR for mind and body approaches.

Dr. Sabri currently represents NCCIH on the following working groups: BRAIN Initiative Team E (understanding circuit function),  Trans NIH Point of Care Technologies (POCTRN), HHS-DoD-VA Pain Management Collaboratory (PMC), NIH SBIR, Small business programs management, Interagency Modeling and Analysis Group/Multiscale Modeling (IMAG/MSM) Technologies, Trans NIH Medical Rehabilitation, the NIH Common Fund Science of Behavior Change program, and National Science Foundation-National Institutes of Health (NSF-NIH) Interagency Initiative: Smart and Connected Health.

Dr. Sabri’s areas of expertise are in the fields of cognitive neuroscience, including attention, perception, executive function, and auditory processing, as well as brain imaging technologies, such as event-related potentials (ERPs), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Sabri earned a master of arts in experimental psychology from Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, and a doctorate of philosophy in experimental psychology from the University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. She completed postdoctoral training in human neuroimaging at Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, and at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Prior to joining NCCIH, she was an assistant professor of neurology and otolaryngology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where her research centered on the neural and cognitive bases of attention and perception.

Dr. Sabri has published on the effects of task and stimulus characteristics on auditory selective attention, focusing on auditory cortex and frontoparietal cognitive control networks. Her articles have appeared in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including NeuroImage, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, Neuropsychologia, and Human Brain Mapping.