Roozbeh Kiani

Official Story

Roozbeh Kiani is an Associate Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University. He received his PhD from the University of Washington and performed his post-doctoral research at Stanford before joining NYU in 2013. Prior to starting his PhD, he completed his medical training in Iran. Kiani investigates the neural computations that underlie visual perception, perceptual decision making, and cognitive control. His research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain. For his scientific achievements, he has received a number of awards and honors, including the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the McKnight Scholar Award, the Pew Scholarship in Biomedical Sciences, and most recently the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences. Kiani is also a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors at the National Eye Institute.

Unofficial Story

Born and raised in Iran, Roozbeh experienced a tumultuous childhood in the midst of post-revolution social unrest and war. But it was a happy childhood too. Roozbeh's family frequently went camping, hiking, and fishing in the mountain ranges south of the Caspian sea. Roozbeh puzzled over everything he saw in those trips: what causes rock formations, how can one tell the distance of nearby lightning, how do the fish breathe, why do we get altitude sickness, ... At school, he gravitated toward sciences to understand the laws that govern nature. Solving his nature puzzles made him happy, and his extensive but haphazard collection of extra-curricular knowledge came handy in the last year of high school when he attended the International Chemistry Olympiad. Through a lucky chain of events, Roozbeh succeeded in the national selection exams for the Iranian team and participated in the international competition, which was held in China. The Iranian team did quite well that year, and Roozbeh won the top gold medal of the competition. But the most thrilling aspect of the competition was the opportunity to meet peers from tens of different countries and to learn about their customs, traditions, and languages. Roozbeh returned home with a deep appreciation of the beauty and power of diversity.

After returning from the chemistry olympiad, Roozbeh started his medical studies in Tehran, despite objections from his father, a medical doctor, who advised him to pursue science. But Roozbeh did not really know what he wanted to do and thought medical school would expose him to new experiences, while giving him time to figure himself out. In a physiology course in medical school, he was introduced to neuroscience and fell in love with it. He joined a group of likeminded medical students in Tehran who gathered weekly to read neuroscience textbooks and discuss papers. Around the same time, Hossein Esteky, who had recently completed his post-doctoral studies with Keiji Tanaka in RIKEN, returned to Iran with the intention to build the first non-human primate electrophysiology lab in the country. Roozbeh was lucky enough to join Hossein's group and under his guidance contributed to building the setups and starting the first projects in the lab. He loved the experience and learned so much from it. However, he struggled to meet the demands of a full time medical internship and his ongoing experiments. He barely had time to eat or sleep, often leaving his apartment before 6 am to rush to the hospital and returning past midnight after his experiments. A few things helped him survive this schedule for two years: Hossein's fatherly support, Keiji's encouragements, friendship and rich intellectual interactions with other lab members, and of course chocolate.

After finishing medical school, Roozbeh applied to graduate programs and was rejected everywhere. He was shaken but cared too much about neuroscience to give up. He traveled to the US to present his findings at the SfN meeting, hoping that he would also find an opportunity to meet his scientific heroes and maybe convince them to give him a chance. The face to face meetings changed everything. A few months later, he joined Mike Shadlen's lab at the University of Washington. It was an ideal environment and Roozbeh had so much to learn from Mike, his collaborators and students. Free from the medical school demands and guided by Mike's brilliance, Roozbeh tackled several difficult questions. More than half of his experiments failed due to technical complications. However, the successful experiments were also those that he cared the most about. He defended his PhD and moved to Stanford for his post-doctoral studies in Bill Newsome's lab. Working with Bill expanded Roozbeh's horizons. Neuroscience was in the midst a transition, breaking away from the single neuron tradition and focusing increasingly more on the dynamics and interactions of neural populations. And there was talk of a BRAIN Initiative to usher in a new era of rapid advance in neuroscience. Bill's wise and compassionate leadership played an important role in shaping these transitions and the BRAIN Initiative itself. It also provided an unparalleled educational opportunity for Roozbeh to figure out what he wanted to do in his own lab.

Roozbeh joined NYU in 2013 to start his lab in the Center for Neural Science. He greatly admires the intellectual tradition of CNS and has served in a variety of departmental responsibilities to strengthen the community. Roozbeh's lab explores the neural mechanisms of flexible decision making in the primate brain. He still puzzles over everything, while trying to be a good friend and advisor for his lab members and a good father for his four year old son.