Nicole Rust

Please spread the word! I am recruiting a PhD student this cycle (Fall 2026 start) to join my team in a new venture: the neuroscience of mood. If you are curious to learn more, this short talk provides a good overview of why, what and how. More info on the terrific Penn Psychology PhD program here:

Information for Applicants | Psychology

Not all scientists appreciate the "why" behind science writing for the public - not just as a service, but for themselves. (I didn't always get it). In this piece for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, I draw on the neuroscience of curiosity & decision making to unpack its value. Share link - open to all: https://rdcu.be/eCGr7

It's publication day for 📘Elusive Cures. What a moment! This is my 1st book & my 1st time on Mindscape (one of my favorite podcasts). Here, @npub1x3gn...k6wt and I have a wide-ranging conversation about the brain, including: Why are brain and mental disorders so hard to understand and treat? The podcast:

317 | Nicole Rust on Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders – Sean Carroll

The book:

Elusive Cures

A neuroscientist’s bold proposal for tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time—brain and mental illnesses

I hope Senator John Fetterman and his team enjoy nonfiction books (or at least this one). Nearly everyone is either themselves afflicted with a brain or mental condition, or knows someone who is. We must do better for those individuals! To achieve that, we need federal support of science.

This! This the type of work that makes me so optimistic that the next 3 decades of brain research will be more impactful that the last for understanding/treating mental conditions. We finally have the right measurement tools & analyses (eg for emotion). https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3971 Treating the brain as a complex dynamical system where emotions are persistent, emergent properties is key to understanding emotion. This is what we'll look back on in 30 years and point to as the genius of this era.

Elusive Cures

A neuroscientist’s bold proposal for tackling one of the greatest challenges of our time—brain and mental illnesses

And this type of cross-species comparative work enables exactly the types of causal perturbation experiments that some are grumbling haven't been done yet. Like this ⬇️ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07915-x