New Professur of Active Perception (Medical Faculty, University of Tübingen)

Ziad M. Hafed (born 1976) was appointed professor of Active Perception at the Faculty of Medicine in May 2018. Since 2010, he has been head of a research group at the Werner Reichardt Center for Integrative Neurosciences (CIN) at the University of Tübingen. His research group "Physiology of Active Vision" is investigating how perception and motor control interact with each other.

Ziad M. Hafed. Foto: Akshay Markanday

Ziad M. Hafed studied engineering at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he received his doctorate in 2003. He did research at McGill University in Montreal and was a Sloan-Swartz (USA) and NSERC (Canada) Post Doctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California (USA) from 2003 to 2009.

The main subject of his research are eye movements, especially the question of how these are tuned to visual stimuli from outside in the brain. Ziad Hafed wants to elucidate the mechanisms by which the brain creates a stable image of the world despite the movements of the eye, head and environment - only with its help are we able to act in a target-oriented manner. For that purpose, he deals with the neural representation of the visual field in the brain, with the directing of attention and above all with the role of the so-called microsaccades: tiny, extremely rapid and constantly unconsciously executed corrections of the visual direction. Another field of research of Ziad Hafed is the so-called blind vision: Patients who have lost conscious vision through damage to the visual cortex continue to show active eye movements for visual stimuli that are unconsciously controlled by other brain areas.

Modified and translated from the original text by Tina Gauger, University of Tübingen

Original text (German)

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