Vanessa Julia Ruta is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila melanogaster.

She is the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University[1] and, as of 2021, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

[6] In work that bridged her postdoc and the establishment of her own independent group her at Rockefeller University, Ruta demonstrated that the mushroom body encodes information using a rewriteable random access memory architecture.

[7] Her lab has elucidated brain circuits that control male fly responses to female pheromones,[8] demonstrated that the memory center of the fly brain uses compartmentalized dopamine modulation to encode behaviors,[9] described the evolution of central neural circuits underlying courtship decisions in Drosophila [10] and solved the structure of the invertebrate olfactory receptor co-receptor (Orco).

In 2013, Ruta received the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, for a project that aims to connect neural plasticity to learning and memory.