I was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1971 and grew up in a boisterous household with my parents, grandparents and often friends and family being around mostly discussing politics and science. The intellectual momentum in my family instilled me with a love of learning and by the time I started secondary school I was already hooked on math and physics. In 1988, the last year of my high-school, I was selected as a member of the National Physics Olympiad to participate in the International Physics Olympiad (IPhO).
Afterwards, I started my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering, majoring in Telecommunication in Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. The most rewarding part of my undergraduate experience, apart from getting a glimpse of the creativity that goes into technological advancement, was the dawn of a new interest in the machinery that allows such creativity; i.e. the brain. At the time, studying the brain seemed to be the decided link between many of my interests including math, biology, philosophy of mind and human behavior. I geared up to join a research lab that would be helpful in refining my ideas. There was one problem though: I had to do my national service first. Although that took two valuable years of my life, it gave me many hours, mostly far from modern life, to think and read. It also triggered in me an interest in agriculture as I had the opportunity to spend long hours with local farmers; this interest culminated in an absolutely unforgettable project where, with the help of two dear friends we rented a piece of land, built a house and four greenhouses on that land and grew in them 500 tissue cultured banana trees that yielded more than 20 tons of banana in the first year. This project, which we used to call 'Shangri-la', has given birth to several much larger-scale operations around the country.
I, however, after the first year of the project, left Iran, first to Toronto, Canada, where I did my Masters in Physiology in the University of Toronto and then to New York where I am now, doing my Ph.D. in the Center for Neural Science in New York University. During my stay in Toronto, I had two great experiences; one, I found my beloved wife and, two, I got exposed to and learned the mysteries of biology, which taught me a great deal about the anatomy and physiology of the body in general, and the central nervous system in particular.
Currently, I am studying the link between attention and perceptual decision making. One of the important aspects of adaptive behavior, is our ability to make decisions by attending to relevant and informative sensory inputs while filtering out the irrelevant sources of distraction. By studying the activity of individual neurons in awake-behaving primates, my research focuses on how the neural instantiation of attention might mediate the filtering needed for enhance perceptual decision making. We perceive everything around us the way our brain chooses to do so; a better understanding of this fantastic piece of tissue is invaluable.