Sahba Besharati
2025
Anticipation Committee member
Pulse of Science
Dr Sahba Besharati is a neuropsychologist and senior lecturer in cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She is the cofounder and joint leader of Wits NeuRL (Neuroscience Research Laboratory) that aims to promote neurosciences research conducted in the South African Context. Sahba is a C1 rated researcher of the South African National Research Foundation (NRF) and was previously a Global Scholar for the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the Brain, Mind and Consciousness Program. She serves on the Editorial Board for the Neuroscience Division of Communications Biology with the Nature, Springer group and is currently an Early Career Editorial Fellow for historically excluded groups for the American Psychological Association (APA) journal Neuropsychology. Sahba’s research draws on interdisciplinary methods to investigate self-consciousness, emotion and social cognition in clinical and healthy populations over the life course. Her research addresses the question of how we become aware of ourselves and others in the world, and how our environment influences this construction of the self. She is actively involved in capacity building in the neurosciences for unrepresented researchers.
