Nicole C. Rust, a professor of psychology in the School of Arts & Sciences, has been named a 2024 Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow. She joins 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 will receive salary support, along with research, travel, and professional development funding.

Dr. 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 the book, 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.

The goal of Dr. 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.