Rafael Yuste was educated in Madrid, where he attended the Decroly and Ramiro de Maeztu Schools and 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 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. This work could help to generate a theory of cortical function and a better understanding of the pathophysiology of epilepsy.