Nicole Rust Recognized by National Academy of Sciences

Nicole Rust, Associate Professor of Psychology, will receive a 2021 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) at the 158th NAS Annual Meeting.

Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by early-career researchers and to further empirical research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.

Rust’s lab combines investigations of human and animal visual memory behaviors, measurements and manipulations of neural activity, and computational modeling to understand the neural basis of visual memory. At Penn, she is Associate Director of Research at MindCORE and Co-Director of the Computational Neuroscience Initiative. She has previously been recognized with a McKnight Scholar award, an NSF CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award.

David Brainard, Associate Dean for the Natural Sciences and RRL Professor of Psychology, says, “In the psychology department we have long known Nicole as an outstanding colleague and scholar, so it is no surprise to see her honored by the National Academy of Sciences. Her pioneering work has clarified how we perceive and remember complex visual information. Congratulations to Nicole on this well-deserved recognition.”

In announcing the award, NAS called Rust’s research “groundbreaking” and stated that she “has pushed the field forward both in providing new insights about how neural signals throughout the visual system inform specific capabilities, and about how the advancement of population-based analysis and computational tools can be applied to other brain areas and activities.”

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and—with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine—provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.