Rate My Professor Frini Karayanidis

Professor Frini Karayanidis is a Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She earned her PhD and Masters Qualifying (Psychology) Honours from the University of New South Wales, and a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from Deree College, Greece. Her career encompasses postdoctoral research fellowships at Hospital Sainte-Justine, Laboratoire de Psychophysiologie Cognitive et de Neuropsychiatrie in Canada (1997-1998) and Macquarie University, School of Behavioural Sciences (1994-1996), and as Research Officer at Prince of Wales Hospital, Biological Schizophrenia Research Team (1992-1994). At the University of Newcastle, she has held positions including Director of the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory since 2014, Director of the Sensory, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Group (2008-2010, 2016-present), Deputy Head (Research & Research Training) of the School of Psychology (2015), Chair of the Research Committee (2014-2015), and Convenor of the Psychological Processes hub of the Priority Research Centre in Stroke and Brain Injury (2016-present). She is also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Professor Karayanidis's research centers on cognitive neuroscience, examining higher-order cognitive control processes such as task switching, proactive and reactive control, cognitive flexibility, and self-control across the lifespan in healthy and clinical populations. Her work integrates behavioral, neuropsychological, EEG/ERP, fMRI, structural MRI, diffusion MRI, fNIRS measures, and mathematical modeling to link brain network maturation to real-world adaptive behaviors. She leads the Age-ility research program (www.age-ility.org.au), including ARC-funded longitudinal studies on adolescence risk behaviors, mid-late life cognitive health factors like cardiovascular risk post-TIA/stroke, and early life cognitive control emergence. Key publications include the book 'Dynamics of cognitive control: A view across methodologies' (2018); chapters such as 'Event-Related Potentials Reveal Multiple Components of Proactive and Reactive Control in Task Switching' (2014) and 'Music and the Brain across the Lifespan' (2021); and journal articles like 'Jointly modeling behavioral and EEG measures of proactive control in task switching' (2023), 'Development of a Prognostic Model for Poststroke Dementia Using Multiple International Cohorts' (2026), and 'Dissociable theta networks underlie the switch and mixing costs during task switching' (2021). As director of facilities at the University of Newcastle and Hunter Medical Research Institute, she fosters cross-faculty collaborations on stroke rehabilitation, brain recovery, and dementia prevention.