Rafael Yuste was born in Madrid, where he attended the Ramiro de Maeztu High School and studied Medicine at the Universidad Autonoma and the Fundacion Jimenez Diaz Hospital. After a brief period in Sydney Brenner's group at the LMB in Cambridge, he did his Ph.D. work with Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel’s laboratory, at Rockefeller University in New York. He then moved to Bell Labs, where he was a postdoctoral student of David Tank and also worked with Winfried Denk. In 1996 he joined the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he is currently Tenured Professor. In 2005 he became HHMI Investigator and co-director of the Kavli Institute for Brain Circuits at Columbia. Since 1997 he is visiting researcher in Javier DeFelipe’s laboratory at the Cajal Institute in Madrid. Yuste is interested in the structure and function of cortical circuits and the biophysical properties of dendritic spines.