Sidarta Ribeiro.

Sidarta Ribeiro

Professor of neuroscience and director
Brain Institute, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

Sidarta Ribeiro is professor of neuroscience and director of the Brain Institute at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte. He has researched and published on memory, sleep and dreams; neuronal plasticity; vocal communication; symbolic competence in nonhuman animals; computational psychiatry; neuroeducation; and psychedelics and drug policy.

Ribero earned his bachelor’s degree in biology at the Universidade de Brasília in 1993, his M.Sc. in biophysics at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 1994 and his Ph.D. in animal behavior at Rockefeller University in 2000, followed by postdoctoral studies in neurophysiology at Duke University. He has written six books, including “The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams” and “The Flowers of Good: The Science and the History of Marijuana Liberation.”

Explore more from The Transmitter

Susumu Tonegawa.

In memoriam: Susumu Tonegawa, ‘intellectual giant’

He won the Nobel Prize for his work on immunology and then went on to define the field of learning and memory.

By Claudia López Lloreda
17 July 2026 | 6 min read
Research image of mouse and human Purkinje cells.

Purkinje cells evolved to have increasingly complex architecture

An increasing proportion of the cerebellar neurons acquired multiple primary dendrites in humans and other apes, according to a comparison of 11 primate species.

By Siddhant Pusdekar
16 July 2026 | 5 min read