Headshot of Nicole Rust

Nicole Rust

Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania;
Contributing editor, The Transmitter

Nicole Rust is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her research focuses on understanding the brain’s remarkable ability to remember the things we’ve seen and using that knowledge to develop new therapies to treat memory dysfunction. She is also writing a book on the types of understanding of the brain that will ultimately be required to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions. In it, she argues that effective progress in brain research will require ambitious and unprecedented multidisciplinary conversations of the type that will appear in The Transmitter.

Rust received her Ph.D. in neuroscience from New York University and completed her postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been recognized by the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the McKnight Scholar Award, a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award, and election to the Memory Disorders Research Society.

Get alerts for essays by Nicole Rust in your inbox.

Subscribe to get notified every time a new essay is published.

Explore more from The Transmitter

Illustration of a sheet of paper with a topography map-like pattern on it.

Why neural foundation models work, and what they might—and might not—teach us about the brain

These models can partly generalize across species, brain regions and tasks, suggesting that a set of machine-learnable rules govern neural population activity. But will we be able to understand them?

By Juan Gallego
13 April 2026 | 8 min read
A fragmenting cube hovers over a person reading a book.

Error equation predicts brain’s ability to generalize

Four statistical measurements of neural network geometry capture how well brains and artificial networks use what they already know to solve new problems, a study suggests.

By Natalia Mesa
10 April 2026 | 5 min read
A large, abstract shape flows out of a small box.

Embrace complexity to improve the translatability of basic neuroscience

Researchers must learn to view heterogeneity as an essential feature of the systems they study and a central consideration in experimental design, not a variable to control for or reduce.

By Linda Douw, Klaus Eyer, Lara Keuck
9 April 2026 | 5 min read