STAT+: 'My life's purpose': A neuroscientist wants to rewire mental illness treatment and remake the field he loves

DURHAM, N.C. — Kafui Dzirasa wants nothing less than to reengineer the brain’s electrical patterns to treat anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. While it sounds far-fetched, many of biomedicine’s biggest funders are betting this psychiatrist, engineer, and neuroscientist might just pull it off.

Grants and awards keep rolling in. A major National Institutes of Health grant before he finished his residency. The 2019 Young Investigator Award from the Society for Neuroscience for research “likely to change the way psychiatrists think about mental illness.” In 2021, the biggest plum in biomedical science — $11 million in Howard Hughes Medical Institute funding — and election into the National Academy of Medicine. More recently, his work implanting electrodes into mouse brains to detect patterns within the chaos of signals ricocheting across the brains of anxious, depressed, and highly social mice helped earn Dzirasa the “high-risk, high reward” NIH Pioneer Award given to researchers whose highly creative efforts are launching new areas of science. 

There’s barely room on the walls of his office on Duke University’s campus for all the awards and magazine covers. Dzirasa, 46, has met with American presidents, is a darling of TEDMED, and has the ear of many of the nation’s science and health leaders.

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