Farzaneh Najafi Lab - Awards, Press & News

Grants and Awards

2027-2028: BBRF Young Investigator Grant (Brain and Behavior Research Foundation)
2026: Junior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award; Georgia Institute of Technology
2026-2028: Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation Award
2025-2027: Whitehall Foundation
2025: Scialog #2 (RCSA: Research Corporation for Science Advancement)
2025: Scialog #1 (RCSA: Research Corporation for Science Advancement)
2025: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Supplemental Funds
2024: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Collaborative Pairs

Press

2026: Predicting the future or remembering the past? By Sainsbury Wellcome Centre (SWC) Speaker Series
2026: Nathan McDonald and Farzaneh Najafi Awarded Curci Foundation Grants | Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society
Nathan McDonald and Farzaneh Najafi Awarded Curci Foundation Grants | Sciences at Georgia Tech
2025: From Molecules to Mind: Farzaneh Najafi Receives Multiple Awards for Cognitive Research | Neuro Next Initiative
2023: Dr. Farzaneh Najafi — Stories of WiN

Lab News

Sep 2026:

Two new PhD students (NSNT program) join our lab. Welcome Ruitao Shen and Mengze Chen!

Aug 2026:

Our lab's 1st paper is now published in Science Advances. Great achievement by Yicong Huang, my 1st PhD student:
Intrinsic timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex during passive behavior | Science Advances

Jul 2026:

Very honored to announce that our lab received the BBRF Young Investigator Grant (Brain and Behavior Research Foundation).
Proud to announce the 1st public release of our lab dataset:
Dataset for "Intrinsic timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex, during passive behavior" | Zenodo
It contains 2-photon calcium imaging data from ~33,000 neurons (cell type specific), in awake mouse's visual and parietal cortices during passive audio-visual stimuli.

Jun 2026:

Master’s student, Ali Shamsnia, is accepted to the 2026 Neurobridges Summer School in Neuroscience.

May 2026:

PhD Student, Yicong Huang, receives INNS Student Travel Award to attend the 2026 InterfaceNeuro conference at Rice University.

Mar 2026:

Very honored to announce that our lab received the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation Award!
Farzaneh receives Georgia Tech's Institute-wide Junior Faculty Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award.

Dec 2025:

My collaborative work with Hannah Choi and her student Aish Balwani is now published in Science Advances:
Constructing biologically constrained RNNs via Dale’s backpropagation and topologically informed pruning | Science Advances

Nov 2025:

Our lab had an incredible presence at SFN this year!: we had 4 posters, and 7 lab members attended SFN.
Yicong, Sana, Zahra, and Mengze presented posters across four distinct projects.

Sep 2025:

It is with great pleasure to announce that the very first paper from our lab is published on bioRxiv:
Intrinsic interval timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex
- - It took tremendous work to build a whole lab from scratch :) This study is done by our lab members, in our lab, using the equipment built and setup in our lab. To see our first paper born, feels very special :)
  - Yicong Huang, my PhD student, heroically led this study, with valuable help from our other amazing lab members:
    Ali Shamsnia, Mengze Chen, Sophie Medico, Tim Stamm, and Shuang Wu.

July 2025:

Yicong, PhD student, receives BME travel award to attend SFN.
Sana, PhD student, recieves QBios travel award to attend SFN.

Apr 2025:

Our multi-lab collaborative review on predictive processing is published on arXiv:
Neural mechanisms of predictive processing: a collaborative community experiment through the OpenScope program

Jan 2025:

Our lab's YouTube channel is launched. We will publish Sybeco talks there.
My collaborative work with Hannah Choi and her student Aish Balwani is now on bioRxiv:
Constructing Biologically Constrained RNNs via Dale's Backprop and Topologically-Informed Pruning

Dec 2024:

Our lab receives the Whitehall Foundation Award! I am thankful and proud of my lab members for providing awesome data, so we can get these grants!
Our paper with Simone Russo and Garrett Stanley is accepted in Scientific Reports:
Spike reliability is cell type specific and shapes excitation and inhibition in the cortex
Farzaneh is selected as an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar Finalist. This is quite an honor!
We receive two Scialog Awards on Molecular Basis of Cognition: One award is with Anita Disney (Duke), and Ritchie Chen (UCSF). Another award is with Longzhi Tan (Stanford), and Masashi Tabuchi (Case Western).
Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition Ends with Awards to 6 Teams
Our work with Jerome and Simone is accepted in iScience: Unexpected events modulate context signaling in VIP and excitatory cells of the visual cortex | bioRxiv

Oct 2024:

Farzaneh receives a new award: Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Collaboration Supplement Awards, together with Luke Mortensen (UGA)!
Our 2 PhD studnets: Yicong Huang & Sana Aminnaji are selected as GT/Emory CNTP scholars (Computational Neural Engineering Training Program)

Sep 2024:

Excited to have multiple new lab members: Sana Aminnaji as a PhD student & Sophie Medico as a research technician, also multiple UG and Master's students!
Our master's student: Esha Choudhary, recieves GRA from the Bioinformatics Masters Program.

Mar 2024:

Farzaneh is selected as a Scialog Fellow, Molecular Basis of Cognition.

Feb 2024:

Farzaneh receives her first award as a PI: Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Collaborative Pairs, together with Giulio Tononi (UW, Madison)!

Jan 2024:

We are excited to have Laurence Copeland join our lab as a research technician!
Our master's student: Hosala Patil, recieves GRA from the Bioinformatics Masters Program.

Nov 2023:

We had our very first successful two-photon imaging experiment today!!

Sep 2023:

Yicong Huang joins the lab as our first PhD student!

July 2023:

Farzaneh's interview with WiN (Women in Neuroscience) podcast is published here. Could be insightful for your career planning!

May 2023:

Our lab renovations are over! So excited about our new, beautiful lab space!
Tim Stamm (ECE) joins our lab to lead the engineering projects. Multiple new undergrads (ME, EE, CE, Neuro, Bio) join our lab to help with our ongoing projects.

Apr 2023:

Vanshika did her first practice surgery! She is doing a great job with ordering supplies and equipment for our lab.

Feb 2023:

Farzaneh launches Sybeco: a virtual journal club dedicated to systems, behavioral, and computational neuroscience. This unique platform features students and postdocs presenting their recent publications.

Jan 2023:

I started my role as a PI :) , together with my research tech, Vanshika, and an undergrad, Reagan!