Golan Shahar, Ph.D., is an Israeli clinical health psychologist and an interdisciplinary stress/psychopathology researcher. Biography and career Shahar was born (1968) and raised in Rishon Le-Zion, Israel. He received all his academic degrees at Ben-Gurion University (BGU): a B.A. (1993) in behavioral sciences, an M.A. (1997) in clinical psychology, and a Ph.D. (1999) in psychological research. He has received advanced statistical training at the University of Essex, UK, and at the Universities of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Yale, US. He was clinically trained at the Shalvata Mental Health Center in Hod-Hasharon, Israel (1997–1999) and the Yale Child Study Center (2002–2004). During the years 1999–2000, Shahar served on the faculty of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and received post-doctoral research training in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Yale University, under the tutelage of Sidney J. Blatt, a world-leading personality and clinical psychologist (2000–2002). Shahar than joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry as assistant professor (2002), with a subsequent affiliation with the Department of Psychology at Yale University (2003). In the fall of 2004, he returned to his alma mater, BGU. There, he first served as associate professor of psychology (2007) with a brief affiliation at the Department of Philosophy (2008), and was than promoted to tenured full professor in 2008. In 2016, he was named Zlotowsky Chair in Neuropsychology. Throughout his service at BGU, Shahar maintained his affiliation with the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. Academic and clinical work Shahar's research, scholarship, and clinical practice targets three domains: The role of personality in depressive psychopathology, resilience and stress-resistance, and psychotherapy integration. Criticism in the self, brain, and relationships Shahar builds on – but also departs from – Sidney Blatt's theory of personality development and psychopathology. Blatt's double helix theory posits that personality and psychopathology develop along two related pathways, one focusing on interpersonal relatedness (the anaclitic-dependent dimension) and the other on identity and achievement (the introjective-self-critical dimension). While this theory has formidably influenced research and practice, Shahar and others have observed that, empirically, the self-critical dimension confers much more vulnerability than the dependent dimension. Consequently, Shahar decided to decipher the nature of criticism in the self, relationships, and – more recently – in brain structure and function. His empirical work, spanning two decades, has illuminated the central role of self-criticism in diverse psychopathologies. He has identified interpersonal pathways through which self-criticism confers