Reflections on the past two decades of neuroscience

Abstract

The first issue of Nature Reviews Neuroscience was published 20 years ago, in 2000. To mark this anniversary, in this Viewpoint article we asked a selection of researchers from across the field who have authored pieces published in the journal in recent years for their thoughts on notable and interesting developments in neuroscience, and particularly in their areas of the field, over the past two decades. They also provide some thoughts on current lines of research and questions that excite them.

The contributors

Danielle S. Bassett is the J. Peter Skirkanich Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Departments of Bioengineering, Electrical and Systems Engineering, Physics and Astronomy, Neurology, and Psychiatry. Her expertise centres on the architecture, function, design and control of complex systems, with a particular focus on large-scale neural systems in humans.

Kathleen E. Cullen is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds joint appointments in neuroscience and in otolaryngology. Her expertise in systems and computational neuroscience uses state-of-the-art methodologies that manipulate and monitor neural circuits to understand the neural computations that predict the consequences of natural self-motion and the implications for perception and action.

Simon B. Eickhoff is a neuroimaging researcher at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf and the Forschungszentrum Jülich. At the interface between neuroanatomy, data science and medicine, his work combines brain mapping, modelling of inter-individual differences and brain–phenotype relationships as well as machine learning for single subject prediction of behavioural traits and precision medicine.

Martha J. Farah is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, where she directs the Center for Neuroscience & Society. Her current research is focused on the relations between socio-economic status and the brain.

Yukiko Goda is Deputy Director and a team leader at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science. Her research addresses the cellular principles by which synaptic strengths are set and dynamically modified at individual synapses in relationship to other synapses in defined neural circuits. Recent efforts in the group also target roles for astrocytes in synapse regulation.

Patrick Haggard leads the ‘Action and Body’ research group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.

Hailan Hu is a professor at Zhejiang University School of Medicine, China. Her research interest focuses on how emotional and social behaviours are encoded and regulated in the brain, with a main focus on the neural circuitry underlying depression and social dominance.

Yasmin L. Hurd is Professor of Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Pharmacological Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York and Director of the Addiction Institute in the Mount Sinai Behavioural Health System. Her research focuses on opioid abuse and the developmental consequences of early drug exposure (particularly cannabis) using multidisciplinary and translational approaches in humans and animal models.

Sheena A. Josselyn is Senior Scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), a Professor at the University of Toronto in Canada and a Senior Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). She is interested in understanding how the brain uses information. Her laboratory uses a variety of experimental techniques to probe memory function in mice.

Baljit S. Khakh is a Professor of Physiology and Neurobiology at University of California Los Angeles. His expertise centres on glial biology and the role of astrocytes in neural circuits. The Khakh laboratory develops and uses novel genetic and optical methods to explore glial biology in vivo.

Jürgen A. Knoblich is Director of the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. He is a developmental neuroscientist studying human brain development and psychiatric disorders. Researchers in his group have developed a method for growing human brain tissue in the laboratory. They can recapitulate human embryonic brain development during the first trimester and analyse the developmental defects leading to neurological disorders.

Panayiota Poirazi is a Research Director at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. She uses mathematical and computational techniques to develop experimentally constrained models of single neurons and neuronal networks, aiming at inferring the contributions of dendritic computations to complex brain functions.

Russell A. Poldrack is the Albert Ray Lang Professor in the Department of Psychology and Professor (by courtesy) of Computer Science at Stanford University, and Director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience. His research uses neuroimaging to understand the brain systems underlying decision-making and executive function. His laboratory also develops neuroinformatics tools to help improve the reproducibility and transparency of neuroscience.

Marco Prinz is a neuropathologist at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Currently, his research group aims to understand myeloid cell biology in the CNS during health and disease and studies the impact of the CNS endogenous immune system on the pathogenesis of neurological disorders such as neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory diseases.

Pieter R. Roelfsema has been Director of the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam, since 2007. He studies visual perception and perceptual organization, as well as plasticity rules. He aims to develop a neuroprosthesis for the visual cortex to restore a rudimentary form of vision in blind individuals.

Tara Spires-Jones is Professor of Neurodegeneration and a UK Dementia Research Institute Group Leader at the University of Edinburgh. Her group studies the role of synapses in brain degeneration and resilience. Using pioneering imaging techniques, her group has discovered links between genetic risk factors for Alzheimer disease and synaptic degeneration.

Mriganka Sur is a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Simons Center for the Social Brain. His laboratory studies mechanisms of brain wiring and processing, especially in the cerebral cortex, and how they go awry in disorders of brain development.

Hiroki R. Ueda is a professor at the University of Tokyo and a team leader in RIKEN BDR. He has an expertise in systems biology and focuses on mammalian sleep–wake cycles. He invented the whole-brain and whole-body clearing and imaging methods called CUBIC and the next-generation mammalian genetics for one-step production and analysis of knockout and knock-in mice without crossing.