To understand the workings of an enormously complex brain, it’s sometimes best to look at a simpler one. Rudy Behnia, whose research centers on vision, studies fruit flies for just that reason.

An innovative digital art installation on the ground floor of the new Jerome L. Greene Science Center invites visitors to peer inside the brain and meet the neuroscientists who are working upstairs to unravel its complexities.

Columbia University Medical Center researchers have discovered a common genetic variant that greatly impacts normal brain aging, starting at around age 65, and may modify the risk for neurodegenerative diseases.

Rui Costa, an incoming principal investigator at Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, asks questions that on the surface seem simple, but, upon further inspection, are extraordinarily complex.

Researchers at at Columbia University’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and New York University have found a genetic signature located exclusively in the nerve cells that supply, or innervate, the muscles of an organism’s outermost extremities: the hands and feet.