[1] Rust was the recipient of the 2021 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for her fundamental contributions to understanding how the cortex makes use of complex visual information to guide intelligent behavior.
[6] She then went on to receive her PhD in Neuroscience from New York University in 2004 under the mentorship of J. Anthony Movshon, and Eero Simoncelli.
There she worked under the mentorship of James DiCarlo, studying how the brain identifies the objects that are present in a visual scene.
Her lab has focused on understanding how the brain uses visual information to solve different tasks, including finding sought objects[11] and remembering the images that have been encountered.
[12] Rust's group also creates machine learning algorithms that mimic neural circuits of memory.