News & Comment

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary year, we thought this would be a good time to reflect on the value that our journal, and other peer-reviewed journals, provide to our authors, our readers, and society.

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how the field has evolved and where it is heading. This month we are talking to Rusty Gage, who is the Vi and John Adler chair for Research on Age-Related Neurodegenerative Disease and Professor of Genetics at The Salk Institute. He is known for his work on neurogenesis in the adult brain and on modelling diseases using human stem cells.

Neuroscience research is affected by a substantial racial bias, but there are major challenges involved in minimizing this bias. Here we discuss these challenges and call for a global discussion that develops answers to these challenges and defines best practices for how researchers can better represent human diversity and work against medical racism. This global discussion should involve researchers from medicine, life sciences, social sciences, and humanities, as well as people with lived experience and health equity activists, to improve racial and ethnic equity in neuroscience research and beyond.

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how the field has evolved and where it is heading. This month we are talking to Carla Shatz, who is the Sapp Family Provostial Professor, Catherine Holman Johnson Director of Stanford Bio-X, and Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at Stanford University. Her work has illuminated mechanisms of visual system development and plasticity and has focused more recently on synaptic pruning mechanisms.

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how the field has evolved and where it is heading. This month we are talking to Klaus-Armin Nave (Director at the Max Planck Institute for Multidisciplinary Sciences, Germany), a glia researcher and molecular biologist who is interested in glia–neuron interactions and a pioneer in the study of the ability of myelinating cells to metabolically support axons.

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how neuroscience has evolved and where it is heading. This month, we are talking to Lucina Q. Uddin, professor-in-residence at Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles and the 2022–2023 Chair of the Diversity & Inclusivity Committee for the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. She uses neuroimaging to study brain networks that support behavior in typically developing children and children with autism. She spoke with me about how she became interested in neuroscience, her career trajectory, and personal experiences that led to her efforts in promoting diversity, equity and inclusion.

This month, Nature Neuroscience celebrates the 25th anniversary of our first issue. To mark the occasion, we reflect on the past quarter of a century of the journal and the field, and look to the future.

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how the field has evolved and where it is heading. This month we are talking to Michal Schwartz at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, a neuroimmunologist and pioneer in the study of the role of the immune system in physiology and in diseases of the central nervous system. She is the winner of the 2023 Israel Prize in Life Sciences.

As Nature Neuroscience celebrates its 25th anniversary, we are having conversations with both established leaders in the field and those earlier in their careers to discuss how neuroscience has evolved, and where it is heading. This month, we are talking to Nii Addy, the Albert E. Kent Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Professor of Cellular and Molecular Physiology, and the inaugural Director of Scientist Diversity and Inclusion at Yale School of Medicine. Dr Addy studies dopamine, motivation, and addiction, and spoke with me about promoting diversity, how to be a good mentor, and communicating with the public via his popular podcast.

To mark the 25th anniversary of Nature Neuroscience, Shari Wiseman spoke with each of the past Chief Editors of the journal: Charles Jennings (1998–2003), Sandra Aamodt (2003–2008), Kalyani Narasimhan (2008–2014), Meredith LeMasurier (2014–2016), and Kevin Da Silva (2016–2021). They shared their memories and insights about the journal’s early days, scientific publishing, and the field of neuroscience.