Rafael Yuste

Biography

Yuste was born on born April 25, 1963 in Madrid, Spain. Yuste's interest in neuroscience arose early, inspired by books like Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Los Tónicos de la Voluntad: Reglas y consejos sobre investigación científica ) (The Tonics of the Will: Rules and Advice on Scientific Research) and supported by his parents. He studied medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and its Fundación Jiménez Díaz Hospital (1982–1987). Finding the treatment and understanding of mental diseases as "primitive", Yuste decided that instead of practicing medicine he would work on laying the scientific basis for future treatments through basic biological research. He worked for two summers (1985/86) in the laboratory of the Nobel Prize laureate Sydney Brenner at the University of Cambridge, but the budget cuts of Margaret Thatcher's government made him look for PhD opportunities in the United States. In 1987 he was admitted to Rockefeller University and joined the group of Nobel laureate Torsten Wiesel, working with Lawrence C. Katz. There he developed the calcium imaging technique to measure and monitor the activity of neuronal populations. The technique is based on the fact that when an electric signal depolarizes a neuron, its calcium channels are activated, thus allowing Ca²⁺ ions to enter the cell. If one brings a calcium-sensitive dye into neurons in the brain, one can detect under the microscope when a neuron is active. The technique is detailed in Yuste's doctoral thesis Optical studies of calcium dynamics in developing neocortical neurons (1992), which was directed by Wiesel and Katz. It has since become one of the technical pillars of neurobiology.

Yuste then moved to David Tank's group at Bell Laboratories where he worked four years as a postdoc, combining calcium imaging with the two-photon microscope invented by Winfried Denk and, through discussions with John Hopfield and David Tank, becoming convinced of the importance of neural networks (rather than just single neurons) for understanding the functioning of the brain (connectionism).

In 1996 Yuste became an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, obtaining tenure in 2002 and becoming a full professor in 2006. Since 2004 he is also co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science at Columbia University and since 2014 the director of Columbia's Neurotechnology Center. Since 2019 he has been the Director of the NeuroRights Initiative.

In 2013 Yuste received the NIH Director's Pioneer Award with a grant of US$2.5 million to fund research to test the hypothesis of the cortex as a random circuit using novel two-photon imaging methods in a large-scale study of the mouse cortical microcircuit.

As of 2021 Yuste has published more than 260 papers. According to Google Scholar he has been cited more than 38,000 times for an h-index of 105.

In 2019 Yuste was appointed Ikerbasque Research Professor and since then he works several weeks per year at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain. In addition, he has served, or currently serves, on the scientific advisory board of several institutes, foundations, and companies in the United States, Spain, and Israel, such as the Fundación Gaeda, BIOFISIKA, a joint Biophysics Research Centre of the Spanish National Research Council and the University of the Basque Country, or Harvard's Conte Center (2013-2017). Yuste has served on the editorial board of numerous professional journals, among them Frontiers in Neural Circuits (chief editor, 2006-2013) and Cerebral Cortex (associate editor since 1998). Yuste co-founded the Neurorights Foundation with human rights lawyer Jared Gesner after both won Global Leadership Prizes from the Tällberg Foundation.