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Suzana Herculano-Houzel

A woman with dark hair styled back, wearing glasses, a brown blazer, and pearl earrings, stands against a dark background.

Brazilian neuroscientist who, in the 2000s, devised the isotropic fractionator — a method of dissolving brains into a uniform suspension and counting cell nuclei directly. Applied to human brains, it gave the now-standard figure of 86 billion neurons, down from the textbook estimate of 100 billion. She is on the faculty at Vanderbilt and writes widely on comparative brain scaling across species.

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