Rafael Yuste


Rafael Yuste is a Spanish neurobiologist and one of the initiators of the BRAIN Initiative announced in 2013.

Biography

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 and supported by his parents. He studied medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and its Fundación Jiménez Díaz Hospital. 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 in the laboratory of the Nobel 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, 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 for understanding the functioning of the brain.
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.
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 2018 Yuste has published more than 200 papers. According to Google Scholar he has been cited more than 29,000 times for an h index of 94.
As an Ikerbasque Research Professor, Yuste works several weeks per year at the Donosti International Physic Center in San Sebastian, Spain. In addition, he has served, or currently serves, on the scientific advisory board of several institutes, foundations, and companies in the US, Spain, and Israel, such as the Fundación Gaeda, the Allen Institute, the Biophysics Institute BIOFISIKA a joint Research Centre of the Spanish National Research Council and the University of the Basque Country or Harvard's Conte Center. Yuste has served on the editorial board of numerous professional journals, among them Frontiers in Neural Circuits and Cerebral Cortex.

Brain Activity Map and BRAIN Initiative

In 2011 at a meeting with funding agencies, Yuste proposed the goal of developing technologies to "record every spike from every neuron" and then co-authored together with George M. Church, Paul Alivisatos, Ralph Greenspan, and Michael Roukes a white paper to elaborate this idea as a large-scale scientific project modelled on the Human Genome Project. Two years later then president Barack Obama announced the US BRAIN Initiative that now funds neuroscience research in over 500 laboratories and is slated to last until 2025. Yuste has warned against spreading the funds of the initiative too thin and argued that a focused effort is required to develop the technologies needed for large-scale, real-time brain imaging with single-neuron resolution that would be made available at observatory-like centers to the scientific community. Yuste has also spearheaded the development of ethical guidelines for neurotechnology and AI, proposing  that five new NeuroRights be added to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to protect human mental privacy, identity, agency and equal access to cognitive enhancement and also prevent algorithm biases. In 2018, professor Yuste was awarded the Eliasson/Tallberg Foundation prize due to his commitment to exploring the ethical implications of using emerging AI in the field of neurotechnology. This prize, which is " awarded annually to outstanding leaders who demonstrate the willingness and capacity to address the complexity of 21st-century challenges in innovative, risk-taking, and ethical ways, and whose work is global in aspiration or implication and is rooted in universal values." is a substantial honor.

Selected honors and awards

Primary research