Parnian completed her BA and MSc degrees in Clinical Psychology at the University of Tehran, Iran. During her time as a master’s student, her research focused on the neural underpinnings of addictive behaviours – more specifically investigating the impacts of psychoactive substances such as cannabis on future-oriented domains of human cognition (such as episodic future thinking and prospective memory). Her thesis used fMRI to examine the neural correlates of episodic future thinking in chronic cannabis users and the results are published in the Psychopharmacology journal. Parnian is also keen on cue-based cognitive intervention paradigms in substance use research and published an opinion paper about their team’s recently developed paradigm titled “Cue-induced Retrieval and Reconsolidation with Episodic Foresight” (CIREF). Before starting her PhD, she worked as a graduate research assistant at the Iranian National Centre for Addiction Studies (INCAS), a registered WHO collaborating centre.
She started her PhD at the Gillan lab in September 2022, zooming out from addiction neuroscience research, aiming to explore a wider area – neurocognitive aspects of habitual behaviours, with a focus on the role of future-oriented cognition, using neuroimaging and electrophysiological techniques, as well as gamified digital health apps. Across her PhD, she has worked on projects examining how goal simulation and episodic future thinking shape the formation and control of habits, and more recently, using natural language processing and large language models to identify linguistic markers of treatment response to smoking cessation. Her PhD research is supported by the Ussher fellowship and a European Research Council grant (ERC-HABIT), aiming to break the most rigid of habits!
She has also been serving as the executive secretary and research assistant for the Neuroscience Interest Group of the International Society of Addiction Medicine (ISAM-NIG) since January 2020. She was the member secretary of the ISAM-NExT committee (2020 – 2022) and the communication officer of the ISAM Global Experts Network (ISAM-GEN).
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Contact email address: Rafeip@tcd.ie
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Selected publications and preprints:
- Buabang, E. K., Suddell, S., Grogan, J. P., Cox, A., St. Martin, N., Donegan, K. R., Rafei, P., O’Connell, R. G., & Gillan, C.M. (2026). Neural dynamics of covert habit activation and control in humans. bioRxiv, 2025-11. DOI [Preprint]
- Rafei, P., Suddell, S., Buabang, E. K., Urcelay, G. P., & Gillan, C. (2026). Does Time Pressure Reveal Habits? Divergent Results from Outcome Devaluation and Response Remapping Paradigms. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. preprint: DOI [Accepted, In press]
- Buabang, E. K., Donegan, K. R., Rafei, P., & Gillan, C. M. (2025). Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 29(1), 41–59. DOI
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