Kafui Dzirasa wants to reengineer the brain’s electrical patterns to treat mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. While most treatments for serious mental illness target the brain’s chemistry, he’s focused on electrical networks that may be signaling out of sync.
Dzirasa, 46, is a psychiatrist, engineer, and neuroscientist. He’s met with American presidents, is a darling of TedMed, and has the ear of many of the nation’s science and health leaders. But he hasn’t always felt welcome in these spaces. As a Black man in neuroscience, he’s often an “only” or a “first” in the room, he told STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling.
Usha first heard about Dzirasa back in 2021, while reporting on an NIH plan to confront systemic racism, she told me. She was intrigued by his groundbreaking research, his high level of achievement at such a young age, and how he was paying it back by spending so much time mentoring. Dzirasa says you can do good science and mentor at the same time. "You don't have to choose," he told Usha.