David Lichtstein is a full professor of physiology at the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the incumbent of the Walter & Greta Stiel Chair in Heart Studies.

He is the former chairman of the Institute For Medical Research, Israel-Canada (IMRIC) (2008–2012) and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2013–2017).

The period of his deanship was characterized by the recruitment of many new faculty members, as well as the establishment of new teaching programs and research centers.

In recent years Lichtstein and his research group have shown that these steroids have a major role in establishing human behavior and that changes in their activity in the brain are associated with depressive disorders.

Lichtstein's work raised the possibility that the sodium-potassium-ATPase and the endogenous cardiac steroids that regulate its activity may serve as a target for drug development for the treatment of bipolar disorders and other psychiatric diseases.