Rafael Yuste was born and educated in Madrid, where he studied Medicine at the Autonomous University and the Jiménez Díaz Foundation. He completed his doctoral studies in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel at Rockefeller University in New York. He was a postdoctoral researcher with David Tank and Winfried Denk at Bell Laboratories. In 1996 he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he currently serves as Professor of Biology. He was the main proponent of the BRAIN initiative adopted by President Obama in 2013. Yuste led the Morningside Group, which proposed new human rights (“Neurorights”), for the protection of brain activity. He has received numerous awards for his work, including those from the Mayor of New York, the American Society for Neuroscience, the Director of the NIH, and is an honorary academic of the Royal Academies of Medicine and of the Natural and Exact Sciences of Spain. He was the recipient of the Eliasson Award for global leadership from the Tällberg Foundation.