Brief Biography
Rafael Yuste was educated in Madrid, where he studied Medicine at the Universidad Autonoma and the Fundacion Jimenez Diaz Hospital. After a brief stint at the MRC-LMB in Cambridge, working in Sydney Brenner’s group, he became a graduate student at Rockefeller University in New York, where he performed his Ph.D. studies under Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel’s laboratory. He then became a postdoctoral student of David Tank at Bell Labs, where he also worked with Winfried Denk. In 1996 he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University as an Assistant Professor, where he is currently Tenured Professor. Since 2005 he is also Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits at Columbia. Finally, since 1997 he is also a visiting researcher in Javier DeFelipe’s laboratory at the Cajal Institute in Madrid. Rafael Yuste‘s laboratory studies the structure and function of cortical circuits and the biophysical properties of dendritic spines. Using a bottom-up approach based on imaging the spontaneous and evoked activity of networks of cortical neurons in thalamocortical slices, he is attempting to decipher the cortical microcircuitry of mouse primary neocortex and reverse engineer its fundamental principles of operation. A second line of work is focused on understanding the biophysical properties of one of the more basic structural elements present in those circuits, the dendritic spines. This work could help to generate a general theory of cortical function and a better understanding of the pathophysiology of epilepsy.