Rate My Professor Maryam Ziaei

Maryam Ziaei is an Associate Professor at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, part of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She leads the Ziaei Group, dedicated to research on aging and the brain. Ziaei earned her Bachelor’s degree in Clinical Psychology from Isfahan University in Iran. She then pursued her Master’s degree in Clinical Neuropsychology at Shahid Beheshti University, also in Iran. Completing her doctoral training, she obtained her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Monash University in Australia. Following her PhD, Ziaei worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Imaging at the University of Queensland. In 2021, she joined NTNU as an Associate Professor and established her research group at the Kavli Institute.

Ziaei’s research centers on aging neuroscience, with a focus on social cognition, emotion processing, and neural mechanisms supporting cognitive resilience in older adults. Her work utilizes advanced neuroimaging techniques, including 7T MRI, to investigate brain changes across the lifespan. Notable publications include "Age-Related Increase in Locus Ceruleus Activity and Functional Connectivity During Social Processing" (2025, Journal of Neuroscience), "Resilience-related neural similarity during naturalistic movie watching predicts future memory performance" (2026, Imaging Neuroscience), "Frontoparietal functional dedifferentiation during naturalistic movie watching in older adults" (2025, Neurobiology of Aging), "Age-related differences in negative cognitive empathy but preserved positive affective empathy" (2021, Brain Structure and Function, cited 41 times), and "Neural correlates of affective empathy in aging" (2022, Aging & Mental Health). She coordinates the course Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience (NEVR3003) and serves as the leader of the study programme council for the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Ziaei contributes to the Brain Health Programme and has given public lectures, such as at NTNU Kveld on brain mechanisms in aging. Her group participates in the Trondheim Aging Brain Study.