Rui Costa, PhD, DVM, is the president and CEO of the Allen Institute. His laboratory develops and uses genetic, electrophysiological, optical and behavioral approaches to investigate the neurobiology of movement in health and disease. He discovered that direct and indirect neural pathways are concurrently active during movement initiation, that this activity is action-specific and needed for proper movement — challenging the classical “go/no-go” model of the function of the basal ganglia, a brain region involved in motor control. He also demonstrated dopamine neuron heterogeneity by showing that a subpopulation is active before movement and critical for initiating and invigorating future movement. These findings have implications for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease. He has received several awards, including the Ariëns Kappers Medal from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Young Investigator Award from SFN and is an elected member of EMBO and the National Academy of Medicine.