About this Event
SWC (Online) Seminar - Dr Farzaneh Najafi, Georgia Institute of Technology
This event will take place on Monday 28 September 2026 at 12pm.
The seminar will be livestreamed via Zoom.
Talk title: Intrinsic timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex, during passive behaviour
Abstract
How does the brain generate and refine predictions to guide behaviour? Although both the cerebellum and neocortex have been independently implicated in predictive processing, how these systems interact to support adaptive behaviour remains poorly understood. Understanding this coordination is essential for uncovering how distributed brain networks support flexible motor and cognitive functions and how disruptions in these processes may contribute to neurological disorders.
In this talk, I will first share my lab's broader vision of how cerebellar interactions with fronto-parietal networks may support predictive processing across different behavioural contexts. I will then discuss the first paper from my laboratory, which investigates the neural basis of temporal predictions during passive behaviour (Huang et al., Science Advances, 2026).
About the speaker: Dr Najafi
Dr. Farzaneh Najafi studied Biotechnology at the University of Tehran. She completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where she investigated cerebellar mechanisms underlying motor adaptation under the supervision of Dr. Javier Medina, in collaboration with Dr. Sam Wang at Princeton University.
She conducted her postdoctoral research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, investigating parietal cortex circuits underlying decision-making behaviour under the supervision of Dr. Anne Churchland.
She then joined the Allen Institute for Brain Science, where she studied neural circuits underlying visually guided behaviour in the teams supervised by Dr. Shawn Olsen and Dr. Jerome Lecoq.
In 2023, she started her laboratory in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, where her research focuses on the neural circuits and computations underlying predictive processing, with an emphasis on cortico-cerebellar interactions.
Her research has been recognized with multiple awards, including support from the Whitehall Foundation, Curci Foundation, Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Research Corporation for Science Advancement. She has also received Georgia Tech's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.
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Event venue & nearby stays
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, 25 Howland Street, London, United Kingdom
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