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Research dossier · People & Ideas

Raz Yirmiya

researcher

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
People and ideasInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ18159261 ↗
Source-derived summary

Raz Yirmiya (Hebrew: רז ירמיה; born 1956) is an Israeli behavioral neuroscientist and director of the Laboratory for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He is best known for providing the first experimental evidence for the role of immune system activation in depression,

for discovering that disturbances in brain microglia cells underlie some forms of depression,

and for elucidating the involvement of inflammatory cytokines in regulation of cognitive and emotional processes.

Biography and academic education

Raz Yirmiya was born in Rehovot, Israel, and grew up in the northern Israeli beach town Nahariya. Following high-school graduation he joined the Israel Defense Forces, and served as an officer in the Education Corps. Raz Yirmiya obtained a bachelor's degree in Psychobiology from Haifa University and M.Sc. in Physiology from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. He did his Ph.D. in Neuroscience under the supervision of Prof. John C. Liebeskind at the University of California, Los Angeles, US. After a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA he returned in 1990 to an academic position in the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in which he was appointed to a full Professor in 2003.

Raz Yirmiya is married to Professor Nurit Yirmiya and they have 4 children.

Scientific career

In his initial studies during the early 1990s Yirmiya demonstrated that psychoactive drugs, particularly alcohol and opiates, modulate immune functioning and resistance to cancer via brain-to-immune communication pathways.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Raz Yirmiya” as researcher. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA productive starting point for separating a subject’s documented career from later reputation and commemoration. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1956, 1990, 2003—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1956-01-01. The account is most persuasive where Yirmiya and researcher can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as researcher. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18159261. VIAF identifies the subject as 116686819. The Library of Congress control number is n92801727. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 1990 and 2003.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
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Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Raz Yirmiya”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Raz Yirmiya primary sources, Raz Yirmiya archive and Yirmiya research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Raz Yirmiya”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Raz Yirmiya” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.