Biography

Maryam Vaziri-Pashkam, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. She is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the intersection of visual cognition and action.

Vaziri-Pashkam has an M.D. from Tehran Medical University and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Harvard University. After receiving her doctoral degree, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Yaoda Xu and Ken Nakayama at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and then as a research fellow with Leslie Ungerleider and Chris Baker at the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, National Institute of Mental Health.

Vaziri-Pashkam's research aims to advance our understanding of the computational and neural mechanisms that enable real-time interaction with objects and people. In the past, she has established the existence of robust representations for objects and actions in the human parietal cortex, a region that bridges the visual and motor areas of the brain. She has also demonstrated humans’ remarkable prediction ability during real-time social interactions.

She is now focusing on delineating the neural circuitry and mechanisms involved in extracting object shape for grasp, determining object affordances, and predicting others’ actions. To do this, she combines multiple methodologies, including body movement tracking, collection and analysis of large datasets of human behavior in naturalistic settings, neuroimaging, and computational methods such as machine learning and natural language processing. Her studies bridge traditional field boundaries and link cognitive, social, and motor neuroscience.