Nicole C. Rust is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, and an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies visual perception and visual recognition memory. She is recognized for significant advancements in experimental psychology and neuroscience. Rust was the recipient of the 2021

Troland Research Award The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness an ...

from the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

for her fundamental contributions to understanding how the cortex makes use of complex visual information to guide intelligent behavior. She was named a McKnight Foundation Scholar (2013), received an

NSF CAREER Award The National Science Foundation CAREER awards, presented by the National Science Foundation (NSF), are in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research and education, and the integration of these endeavors i ...

(2013) and was named an Alfred P.

Sloan Research Fellow The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

(2010).

Education and early career

Rust received her bachelor's degree in from the University of Idaho in 1997. She then went on to receive her PhD in Neuroscience from New York University in 2004 under the mentorship of

J. Anthony Movshon Joseph Anthony Movshon (born December 10, 1950 in New York City) is an American neuroscientist. He has made contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms that represent the form and motion of objects, and the way these mechanisms co ...

, and Eero Simoncelli. There, her work focused on how the primate brain processes information about visual motion, including in the primary visual cortex and area MT.

Career and research

Rust completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 2004 and 2006. There she worked under the mentorship of

James DiCarlo James Joseph DiCarlo (born 1967) is an American neuroscientist currently serving as the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Biography DiCarlo received his BS in biomedical engineering at Northwe ...

, studying how the brain identifies the objects that are present in a visual scene. Rust joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Her lab has focused on understanding how the brain uses visual information to solve different tasks, including finding sought objects and remembering the images that have been encountered. Rust's group also creates machine learning algorithms that mimic neural circuits of memory.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Rust, Nicole C. Living people University of Idaho alumni New York University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni University of Pennsylvania faculty American neuroscientists American women scientists Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics 21st-century American women