Nicole Rust Named Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow

Professor of Psychology Nicole C. Rust has been named a 2024 Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow, a program launched in 2022 that supports “researchers who have a strong track record of success and achievement in their current field, as well as a deep interest, curiosity and drive to make contributions to a new discipline.” As a fellow, she’ll receive salary support, along with research, travel, and professional development funding.
 
Rust’s research combines behavioral, neural, and computational approaches to understand the brain’s remarkable ability to remember what we’ve seen, including where and how visual memories are stored. As a complement to this foundational research, she has worked to develop new therapies to treat memory dysfunction. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Elusive Cures: Why Neuroscience Hasn’t Solved Brain Disorders—and How We Can Change That. In it, she argues that treating a brain disorder is more like redirecting a hurricane than fixing a domino chain of cause and effect and that only once we embrace the idea of the brain as a complex system will we have any hope of improving treatments and cures for brain and mental illness.
 
Rust has a long history of studying vision and memory, investigating how our brains drive answers to questions like “Have you seen this before?” Work from her research group has described the events leading up to our perception that something is familiar, including where and how our brains store memories. One of the goals of her future research is to understand the equivalent of one of the brain’s most mysterious functions—mood—including what drives mood percepts and answers to questions like, “How happy are you right now?”
 
The goal of Rust’s fellowship is to determine ways to approach the subjectivity of mood in a manner that can facilitate a rigorous, computationally grounded understanding of mood percepts and how they are shaped by the brain. In that pursuit, she plans to bring a systems neuroscience perspective to mood research that parallels the approaches that have led to breakthroughs in perception, memory, and decisionmaking. Her Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship will be guided by the mentorship of Yael Niv at Princeton, whose group has developed a compelling, state-of-the-art theory about what mood is and why it exists.