Dr. Maryam Ziaei
Associate Professor and Group Leader at Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norway
Postdoctoral fellow University of Queensland, Australia
PhD University of Queensland, Australia
Future neuroscientists become interested in the brain for many reasons, but it’s a rare exception when the thing that ignites a young scientist’s curiosity ends up shaping their entire career. Dr. Maryam Ziaei embodies that exception, and her interest in the neural basis of the positivity effect in aging has led her around the world. Now, as an Associate Professor and Group Leader at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Norway, Maryam and her lab study the neural bases and impact of aging on emotional processing in humans.
Maryam’s journey started in Iran, where she studied Clinical Psychology at Isfahan University. She was so intrigued by lectures on psychopharmacology and neuroendocrinology that she followed her professors out of class to ask more questions. Her enthusiasm inspired one professor to help her launch her first research project. Even though she did not have an official lab space or equipment, Maryam sought to replicate the “positivity effect” in aging. In this phenomenon, older adults tend to pay more attention to positive experiences and emotions than negative ones. Younger adults show the opposite trend, attending more to negative stimuli. For instance, a grandmother might remember the enjoyable lunch she shared with her grandchild more clearly than a negative news headline she read that morning. To study this phenomenon as an undergrad, Maryam visited public parks in her hometown, seeking out older folks who took walks in the quiet morning hours to study their emotional experiences.
Maryam’s interest in the positivity effect during her undergraduate studies powered her research from then on. She pursued her master’s in clinical neuropsychology at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, where she studied alterations in emotional processing in patients who had sustained brain damage. Her master’s work inspired her to think beyond the clinic to the neural basis of emotional processing in healthy individuals. After finishing her degree, she began a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in Stockholm, Sweden, where she began collecting fMRI data to investigate the patterns of brain activity responsible for the positivity effect. However, when her husband moved to Adelaide, Australia, Maryam had to change course. Although she was able to continue working with the data she had collected in Stockholm, she restarted her PhD at the University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane so she could be closer to her partner.
In her PhD research, Maryam identified a compelling neural basis of the positivity effect using fMRI and pupillometry, a method that tracks the size of the pupil of the eye and serves as an indirect indicator of brain activity. In her experiments, older and younger adults were asked to respond to images of faces expressing positive and negative emotions. She found that the positivity effect in older adults was mainly driven by the suppression of negative stimuli. Specifically, when older adults looked at faces expressing negative emotions, their pupils dilated more than younger adults, a response associated with increased cognitive control. fMRI indicated that activity in brain regions involved in cognitive control, including the prefrontal cortex, also changed significantly during the task. These responses indicated that older adults’ brains suppress the response of the negative image more than their younger counterparts. Her work has therapeutic implications for many conditions that affect emotional processing, like depression, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease.
Maryam continued this research in her postdoc, a position she was offered after giving a talk to the Center for Advanced Imaging at UQ. She continued her fMRI research on how aging affects other high level emotional and social cognitive processes such as empathy. She investigated how older and younger adults might respond to empathizing with others differently and reported that older adults empathize with positive emotions more than younger counterparts. In fMRI in older adults, empathy with positive emotions was related to activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, while the anterior cingulate was more responsive to empathy with negative emotions. Interestingly, this trend was not observed in younger adults, indicating that age may drive differences in the neural basis of emotional processing.
After four years of postdoctoral research, Maryam accepted her current position as a Group Leader in the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience and moved her family to Norway. Her lab combines structural and functional neuroimaging with eye tracking, pupillometry, and physiological response recording to study emotional processing. Her research focuses on three main areas: 1) how observations of emotional processes in the lab can extend to real life situations, 2) how brain structures like the locus coeruleus, amygdala, and prefrontal cortex drive emotional responses, and 3) how emotional processing differs in clinical populations of patients with psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Like many scientists on their career journeys in academia, Maryam encountered the “two-body problem,” a phenomenon in which a partnered couple might struggle to find desirable research/industry jobs in the same city. Maryam experienced this early on when she left Stockholm one year into her PhD to be closer to her husband in Australia. Even though they were on the same continent, they were still a 2-hour flight apart for all of graduate school. Then, when Maryam was offered a postdoc at UQ, the director of the Advanced Imaging Center also offered her husband a position and the couple started living together in Brisbane and started their family. Maryam’s job at the Kavli Institute led the family to move again, and it took eight months for her husband to find a satisfactory position in the new country. Each transition required them to think of the future and make compromises. By the time Maryam and her husband moved to Norway, their family expanded, and they now have two children. “We must think about their future and do what’s best for them,” she says. Despite the challenges of moving across the world, Maryam is grateful for the experience of living in four different cultures, and it has shaped her efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in science. She currently serves on the Council and the Diversity and Inclusivity Committee for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping and drives multi-faceted initiatives to facilitate diversity in neuroimaging research.
In addition to emphasizing inclusivity, Maryam focuses on mentorship. For her, hiring a first postdoc and PhD student who were the “right fit” was incredibly important, as their work together shaped the direction of the lab. She was committed to being a good mentor through maternity leave after the birth of her second child, even with limited time in the lab. Each time she met with her trainees, Maryam challenged them: “You have ten minutes to teach me something.” The brief first 10 minutes of their meetings were fun for both her and her trainees, keeping her updated on their work, and enabling them to become efficient communicators about the science they most enjoyed. Finding joy in research is a spirit Maryam tries to foster in her mentees, and she advises that anyone starting out in science remember to “keep their eyes on the road,” like they are riding a bike towards that joy. Forward momentum is tricky in the face of distractions, and it’s easy to be diverted by external stresses or internal insecurities. “Don't turn your head towards distractors, or else you lose what is in front of you, and you will fall. Then you won’t be able to do what brings you joy.” Her advice is reminiscent of the cognitive control seen in her positivity effect research. Throughout the phases of her career and into the present, Maryam has followed her own advice and keeps her gaze forward as follows her own joy in the science of emotion in the brain.
Find out more about Maryam and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Maryam on Sept. 6, 2024 below!
