Carmel received a doctoral degree from Yale Law School (1989) and led an academic and public interest career in Israel and internationally, focusing on bioethics and human rights from birth to death. She is the author of two books in this field - Birth Power: The Case for Surrogacy (Yale University Press, 1989) and Health and Human Rights in Israeli Law (Ramot, Tel Aviv University Press, 2003) [in Hebrew]. She now teaches at Tel Aviv University – a course on end-of-life care.

After sitting a mindfulness silent retreat in the mid-'90s, she has been walking a path of secular Buddhism and she co-translated Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs into Hebrew (2015). Her own most recent book is In Praise of Ageing – Awakening to Old Age with Wisdom and Compassion (Watkins UK, 2020).

Throughout the years, Carmel's main interest has been in the ethics of care and responsibility from a feminist and secular Buddhist perspective, and she contributes in writing to the Secular Buddhist Network (SBN). In 2022 she started working with SBN friends to develop an online course on Mindfulness Based Ethical Living (MBEL), which applies the skill of mindfulness to our actions in the world in daily life, based on the teachings of Stephen Batchelor.