Alona Ben-Tal (Hebrew: אלונה בן טל) is an Israeli and New Zealand applied mathematician who works as an associate professor and deputy head of school in the School of Natural and Computational Sciences at Massey University.
[2][4] After working in industry for three years, she moved with her family to New Zealand and returned to graduate study in mathematics,[2][3] completing a Ph.D. in 2001 at the University of Auckland with the dissertation A Study of Symmetric Forced Oscillators supervised by Vivien Kirk, Graeme Wake and Geoff Nicholls.
[5][6][7] After she completed her doctorate, she held positions at the University of Auckland as a fixed-term lecturer in mathematics, and then as a NZ Science & Technology Post-doctoral Fellow in the Bioengineering Institute, before moving to Massey University as a lecturer in 2005.
[2] In her work on human breathing, Ben-Tal has studied respiratory sinus arrhythmia, the phenomenon that the heart rate speeds up while inhaling and slows down while exhaling.
Initially hypothesising that this variability would improve the rate of gas exchange in the lungs, her research found that instead it saves effort by the heart while maintaining even levels of blood oxygenation.