14 Facts About Vanessa Ruta

Vanessa Julia Ruta is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila melanogaster.

Vanessa Ruta is the Gabrielle H Reem and Herbert J Kayden Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University and, as of 2021, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Vanessa Ruta was one of the six fellows from New York City.

Vanessa Ruta went on to perform doctoral research in the laboratory of Rod Mackinnon, earning her Ph.

Vanessa Ruta worked out the mechanism by which spider toxins bind the voltage sensor domain of potassium channels.

Vanessa Ruta joined the faculty at The Rockefeller University in 2011.

In work that bridged her postdoc and the establishment of her own independent group her at Rockefeller University, Vanessa Ruta demonstrated that the mushroom body encodes information using a rewriteable random access memory architecture.

Vanessa Ruta's lab has elucidated brain circuits that control male fly responses to female pheromones, demonstrated that the memory center of the fly brain uses compartmentalized dopamine modulation to encode behaviors, described the evolution of central neural circuits underlying courtship decisions in Drosophila and solved the structure of the invertebrate olfactory receptor co-receptor.

Vanessa Ruta is a member of the selection committee of the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize.

In 2013, Vanessa Ruta received the National Institutes of Health Director's New Innovator Award, for a project that aims to connect neural plasticity to learning and memory.

Vanessa Ruta was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2019.

Vanessa Ruta spent her early childhood in New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Vanessa Ruta returned to New York City to live in the Westbeth Artists Community in Greenwich Village, and she attended Stuyvesant High School.

Between high school and college, Vanessa Ruta was a professional ballet dancer.