Farzaneh Olianezhad, PhD

Farzaneh is a postdoctoral fellow in the Gulli Lab within the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research examines how abstract representations of prior experience are formed, maintained, and recruited to guide adaptive choices in novel situations. She is particularly interested in how the hippocampus, thalamus, and prefrontal cortex work together to support learning and memory-guided behavior, and how this circuitry might be targeted to treat cognitive dysfunction. To address these questions, she combines virtual reality, large-scale electrophysiology across multiple brain regions, and quantitative behavioral analysis in nonhuman primates.

Farzaneh completed both her BSc and MSc in Electrical Engineering in Tehran, Iran, before moving to the United States to pursue her PhD in Vision Science at the State University of New York with Dr. José-Manuel Alonso. Her doctoral work drew on vision science, computational modeling, and systems neuroscience to investigate the neural basis of binocular vision. Using multielectrode recordings from primary visual cortex, she characterized differences between the monocular receptive fields of binocular neurons and developed computational frameworks describing how subtle disruptions in cortical processing can give rise to pronounced perceptual distortions in binocular deficits.