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Rui Costa

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Rui Costa
BornJuly 15, 1972 (age 51)
Guarda, Portugal
🎓 Alma materUniversity of Lisbon

University of California, Los Angeles

Duke University
💼 Occupation
Known forBrain circuits for movement and learning.
🌐 Websitehttps://alleninstitute.org/person/rui-costa/

Dr Rui Costa, D.V.M, PhD. (born Guarda, Portugal) is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute, based in Seattle.

With over two decades of experience in neuroscience, he is an expert in the brain circuitry that underlies movement and learning. His studies focus on the neural circuits underlying the initiation and execution of self-paced movements, and the organization and refinement of movements during learning.

His work has shed light into how the brain chooses which actions to do to obtain desired outcomes, and how the brain toggles between goal-directed actions and habits. His discoveries have implications for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, and psychiatric disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Early Life & Education[edit]

Costa was born in Guarda, Portugal in 1972, where he grew up and attended high school. He received his D.V.M.from the University of Lisbon in 1996. Costa carried out his Ph.D. research with Dr. Alcino Silva at UCLA from 1998 to 2002 as a part of the GABBA graduate program of University of Porto, followed by postdoctoral work with Dr. Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University.

Career[edit]

Costa became a Section Chief at the National Institutes of Health in 2006. He moved to the Champalimaud Foundation in 2009, as one of the founding Investigators of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program at the Champalimaud Institute of the Unknown. He was Deputy Director of the Champalimaud Neuroscience Program and then co-Director of Champalimaud Research. In 20116 he moved to Columbia University where he became a Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology, and then the CEO of the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute in 2017. He became President and CEO of the Allen Institute, established by Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, in 2022.

Costa has made breakthrough contributions to the field of motor control. He developed and utilized novel molecular, cellular, electrophysiological and optical approaches to reveal how specific neuronal populations in the basal ganglia, as well as upstream and downstream circuits, are wired and operate during movement; and how plasticity and reorganization of these circuits underlies motor learning.

The traditional consensus, built over decades, was that basal ganglia exerted its role in movement via activation of a Go pathway - the direct pathway (prokinetic) - and inactivation of a No-go pathway - the indirect pathway (antikinetic). By using targeted recordings of the direct and indirect pathways, in conjunction with online gain or loss of function studies, Costa’s work has led to a revision of this model. He discovered that both pathways are active during movement and their activity is critical for movement. To come to this conclusion he developed new technologies, for example in vivo calcium imaging with genetically encoded sensors and fiber optic-based photometry, a now widely used technique. He found that activity in both striatal pathways is movement-specific, and organized in spatiotemporal patterns that encode the entire action space. Costa’s work lead to a model in which both pathways have complementary but different roles in movement and reinforcement, of fundamental import for understanding and developing therapies for movement disorders.

Costa’s work also revolutionized our understanding of the wiring and function of basal ganglia inputs and outputs. Costa pioneered the studies that showed that a sub-population of dopamine neurons from the substantia nigra pars compacta are transiently active before self-paced movement initiation, and are critical for initiating and invigorating future movements, a finding with implications for Parkinson’s disease. He also showed that different populations of corticospinal neurons differentially project to molecularly identified cell types in the spinal cord, and that there is coordination between motor cortex connectivity to spinal cord and striatal circuits. Additionally, he demonstrated projection-specific connectivity of basal ganglia outputs to brainstem nuclei, midbrain and thalamus.

Costa revealed cortico-basal ganglia circuit mechanisms underlying the automatization of movement sequences and the dichotomy between goal-directed actions versus habits. These studies revealed mechanisms by which habits can be formed and broken, and explored the effect of chronic stress in these mechanisms.

Finally, using a plethora of behavioral tasks and closed-loop brain-computer interface experiments he showed that plasticity in basal ganglia is critical to reinforce and refine the behavioral and neural activity patterns that lead to reward.

Selected Awards & Affiliations[edit]

Selected Publications[edit]

  • Jin X & Costa RM (2010). Start/stop signals emerge in nigrostriatal circuits during sequence learning. Nature; 466(7305):457-62. doi: 10.1038/nature09263. PMID: 20651684
  • Koralek, AC*, Jin, X*, Long II, JD, Costa RM*, Carmena JM*. (2012). Corticostriatal plasticity is necessary for learning intentional neuroprosthetic skills. Nature, 483(7389):331-5. doi: 10.1038/nature10845. PMID: 22388818
  • Cui, G, Jun SB, Jin, X, Pham, MD, Vogel SS, Lovinger DM & Costa RM. (2013) Concurrent activation of striatal direct- and indirect-pathways during action initiation. Nature. 494(7436):238-42. doi: 10.1038/nature11846. PMID: 23354054
  • Jin X, Tecuapetla F, Costa RM (2014). Basal ganglia subcircuits distinctively encode the parsing and concatenation of action sequences. Nature Neuroscience, 17(3):423-30. doi: 10.1038/nn.3632. PMID: 24464039
  • Tecuapetla F, Jin X., Lima SQ, Costa RM (2016). Complementary contributions of striatal projection pathways to action initiation and execution. Cell, 166(3):703-15. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2016.06.032. PMID: 27453468
  • Gremel CM, Chancey J, Atwood B, Luo G, Neve R, Ramakrishnan C, Deisseroth K, Lovinger DM, Costa RM (2016). Endocannabinoid modulation of orbitostriatal circuits gates habit formation. Neuron, 90(6):1312-24. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2016.04.043. PMID: 27238866
  • Klaus A, Martins GM, Paixão VB, Zhou P, Paninski L, Costa RM (2017). The spatiotemporal organization of the striatum encodes action space. Neuron, 95(5). doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2017.08.015. PMID: 28858619
  • Silva JA, Tecuapetla F., Paixão VB, Costa RM (2018). Dopamine neuron activity before action initiation gates and invigorates future movements. Nature, 54(7691):244-248. doi: 10.1038/nature25457. PMID: 29420469
  • Athalye VR, Santos, F, Carmena JM*, Costa RM* (2018). Evidence for a neural law of effect. Science, 359(6379):1024-1029. doi: 10.1126/science.aao6058. PMID: 29496877
  • Akam T, Rodrigues-Vaz I, Marcelo I, Zhang X, Pereira M, Oliveira R, Dayan P, Costa RM (2020). Anterior cingulate cortex represents action-state predictions and causally mediates model-based reinforcement learning in a two-step decision task. Neuron, doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.10.013.
  • McElvain LE, Chen Y, Moore JD, Brigidi GS, Bloodgood BL, Lim BK, Costa RM*, Kleinfeld D*. (2021). Specific populations of basal ganglia output neurons target distinct brain stem areas while collateralizing throughout the diencephalon. Neuron. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.03.017. PMID: 33823137
  • Nelson A, Abdelmeish B, Costa RM (2021). Corticospinal populations broadcast complex motor signals to coordinated spinal and striatal circuits. Nature Neuroscience; doi: 10.1038/s41593-021-00939-w. PMID: 34737448
  • Arber, S & Costa, RM (2022). Networking brainstem and basal ganglia circuits for movement. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 23 (6), 342-360 (2022). PMID: 35422525

Selected Academic Services & Boards[edit]

  • 2023 to present SAB, Stanely Center, Broad Institute
  • 2021 to present SAB, Champalimaud Foundation, Portugal.
  • 2021 to present SAB, Friedrich Miescher Institute, Switzerland.
  • 2019 to present SAB, Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University, USA.
  • 2020                 SAB, Center for Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF), Belgium
  • 2019                 SAB, Sainsbury Wellcome Center (SWC), UK.
  • 2018 to 2022 Co-Chair of the Gordon Conference on Basal Ganglia
  • 2015 to 2018 Board of Reviewing Editors, eLife, DC, USA.
  • 2015 Advisory Board, EMBL Monterotondo, Italy.
  • 2014 to 2016 Executive Committee, Federation of European Neuroscience Societies.
  • 2014 to 2016 Chair, Program Committee, Federation of European Neuroscience Societies.
  • 2011 to 2015 Vice-President, Portuguese Society for Neuroscience.
  • 2008 to present President of the Board of Directors of the American-Portuguese Biomedical Research Fund, New York, USA.


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