João Couto is an assistant project scientist in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portugal. For his doctoral work, with Michele Giugliano and Erik De Schutter at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, he studied the dynamical properties of Purkinje cells using closed-loop electrophysiology.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Neuroelectronics Research Flanders and later at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Couto helped pioneer large-scale electrophysiology and imaging methods to study how sensory signals and internal states shape neural activity. His current research, with Anne Churchland at UCLA, examines how information is broadcast across brain circuits and cell types and how internal cognitive processes are integrated with sensory evidence during perceptual decision-making. Couto developed chronic recording and analysis methods, many of which are shared openly, and aims to understand how learning shapes long-range neural pathways to support goal-directed behaviors and how these pathways may be altered in genetic models of autism.