‘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.

But getting here hasn’t been easy. As a Black man in neuroscience, Dzirasa is often an only or a first in the lofty scientific spaces he inhabits. In 2007, he was the first Black person to graduate with a Ph.D. in neurobiology at Duke. Only about 2% of the scientists who have received either Pioneer or HHMI Investigator awards are Black. He’s one of them. And yet, when he entered the lobby of a hotel hosting a research conference he was keynoting a few years ago — his face on huge posters everywhere, no less — a woman handed him her luggage.

Despite such indignities, Dzirasa is unfailingly gracious, affable, and upbeat in public. But in rare moments he shares a truer, more complicated self. In July 2020, he wrote a searing commentary to his colleagues in Cell, explaining just how much his experience as a Black man in science differs from theirs. 

“I have tried to live in a world that does not see color but have only succeeded in living in a world that does not see me,” he wrote just two months after the murder of George Floyd. “At this very moment, I am terrified to run on the trail near my home.”

Dzirasa loves nothing more than being in his lab, working with mice, electrodes, and the diverse team of scientists he’s mentoring, pushing to understand the normal and diseased states of the brain by listening in on its noisy signaling, while trying to hold open the doors to medical academia that have not always been welcoming to all. 

Most treatments for serious mental illness focus on chemistry — drugs that alter the brain’s potent neurotransmitters. Dzirasa has turned instead to understanding “electome factors,” networks within the electrical buzz that ceaselessly bounces across the brain. In some mental disorders, the signals may be out of sync, something Dzirasa calls “the metronome problem.” 

Could he “retune” these patterns, he wonders? Could he make pacemakers for the brain to normalize aberrant patterns in patients with psychosis, schizophrenia, or debilitating treatment-resistant depression? He realizes such research is taking on not one stigma, but two. Mental illness is stigmatized but so are attempts to use electricity to treat it. While electrical shock therapy caused untold harms in the last century, its modern incarnation, called ECT, does work for some patients with severe depression, though it’s not known why. That’s what Dzirasa — using his background in engineering and psychiatry as he teams with experts in machine learning and protein engineering — is trying to figure out. 

If anyone can succeed, say those who know him, it’s Dzirasa, known to his friends and mentees as “Kaf.” 

“He is a force of nature. I’ve known that about him since he was 17,” said Freeman Hrabowski, who was president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, when Dzirasa earned his undergraduate degree there and remains in close touch. “When Kaf talks to me about his science, I get tears. It’s like the universe opening up.”

Dzirasa’s childhood in Baltimore wasn’t the easiest. His parents divorced when he was 7. He grew up with his mom, a registered nurse, working extra weekend and night shifts, the equivalent of two jobs. There were roaches and the noise of snapping mousetraps at night. But there was also intellectual privilege. His Ghanaian parents were highly educated; his father had not one, but two degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

His mom got him his first PC in the early ’90s at a time few households had a personal computer; he promptly took it apart and rebuilt it. He spent weekends at his dad’s house in Virginia, coding with his two brothers and neighborhood friends. Years later, his younger brother founded and now runs Fearless Technology, Baltimore’s largest minority-owned business, while his older brother is a successful defense contractor. One close childhood friend started a company, Webs.com, that he sold to Vistaprint for $117.5 million, another founded the company that became Rocket Money. “This is the engineering collective I grew up in,” Dzirasa said. 

He didn’t get good grades — for reasons he only came to understand much later. In fifth grade, his school tried to hold him back until his mother and a teacher who saw his potential intervened. In high school, he was in all the hard classes — AP physics, AP chem — starting early on his path of being one of the only Black or Hispanic kids in the room. “That became the norm for me, and my high school was one of the most diverse in the nation,” he said. 

He may not have gotten top grades. But his computer science teacher still remembers one of his projects. The assignment was to code a way to analyze receipts at a gas station. Dzirasa did that, but also included detailed animations of the faces of customers pumping gas. “It was so extra,” he laughed. And the CompSci AP exam that year? He got a perfect score. 

His mom wanted him to be a doctor. He wanted to be a D1 college athlete. They compromised. He went to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, known for its Meyerhoff Scholars Program, which has graduated hundreds of Black students who have gone on to earn science Ph.D.s, M.D.s, or both, including Kizzmekia Corbett, who played a leading role in developing Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine. It was a D1 school where Dzirasa could compete in long jump, stay close to home, and receive a full academic scholarship. 

He got his first wake-up call during the Meyerhoff summer bridge program. He was getting great grades and excelling in summer track meets. But he was pulled aside by the program’s legendary executive director at the time, Earnestine Baker, who said she knew he could work harder. “I’d never had anyone talk to me like that,” Dzirasa recalled. “I was objectively outperforming, but the effort was not sufficient for who I was going to be in life.” The lesson stuck. 

His professors remember him, not always for good reasons. He didn’t take notes, yet got top grades and would point out errors professors made on their tests. Some thought he was arrogant, others that he was up to something to get such good grades with what looked like so little effort. 

For Dzirasa, it was the beginning of learning that his brain worked differently than others; he now recognizes it as ADHD. He couldn’t bear to listen to lectures, the “baud rate” was too slow, he said. He couldn’t memorize long lists of facts. But when he was interested in something, he could shut out the world to focus and work through the most complex problems. He pulled together a study group of students whose skills complemented each other. Once he figured this all out —  “hacked my classes” as he put it — he started getting not only good grades, but the best grades.

“And let me say, few professors have seen Black students not only at the top of the class, but getting the highest A’s — and then asking questions that have never been asked before,” Hrabowski said.

Hrabowski was among those who wrangled with Dzirasa. In fact, it’s fair to say the young Dzirasa drove him crazy. Hrabowski told him that he couldn’t run track and expect to succeed in the Meyerhoff program; that science had to be his first and only love. Hrabowski, a prodigy who earned a college math degree at the age of 18, admits he had no clue about athletics. “I’m a nerd,” he said. Through Dzirasa, “I learned athletics is important for discipline.” 

His third year in college, Dzirasa jumped 6.96 meters, winning the D1 Northeast Conference indoor track long jump championship. The next year he became student body president.

After college, Dzirasa wanted to go to graduate school for a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering. His mother wanted him to be a doctor. So he ended up in a joint M.D./Ph.D. program at Duke. It was a disaster. 

Medical school classes — the long lectures, the memorizing — weren’t going well. He was getting terrible grades. “I was failing and I didn’t even want to be a doctor,” he said.

Distraught, he got in his car one evening and drove north to Baltimore. He ended up at Hrabowski’s front door. The two men sat on the front steps and talked for hours. Dzirasa wanted to know why he should stay in medical school if he hated it so much, if all he wanted to do was scientific research. 

Hrabowski convinced him to stay, arguing that the medical degree would earn him respect and propel his science. Dzirasa drove back to Duke. He stopped going to classes and instead listened to recordings of lectures at 2x speed; a people person, he found his footing during clinical rotations, seeing patients in the hospital. 

It was the psychiatry rotation that changed his research focus to neuroscience. With his engineering background, Dzirasa had been interested in biomechanics, particularly in working on a brain-body interface that could enable people to control prosthetic arms with their minds. But in psychiatry, he met patients who reminded him of family members, particularly an uncle who suffered from schizophrenia.

Through his classes, Dzirasa learned he was at the age when serious mental illness, which can run in families, often becomes apparent. “It wasn’t lost on me,” he said. “I became really motivated to save myself and my family. It became my life’s purpose.” 

He steered his research toward the workings of the brain. He was interested in dopamine and how it regulated sleep. His audacious goal at the time was to find some way to turn on and off the REM sleep cycle in an effort to stem psychosis. If his med school classes were a grind, Ph.D. research was his reward. “A lab rat,” as he terms himself, he practically lived at the bench, earning his doctoral degree in just 3.5 years, a department record. 

Duke then offered something that was unheard of: a faculty position, and his own lab — while he was still in his psychiatry residency. It was the equivalent of having more than two jobs at once, and possible only because he took additional time to complete his medical training. 

He took things slowly, methodically building out his lab and writing grant applications as he worked shifts in Duke’s hospital. His first nine grants were rejected. But on his 10th try, he was awarded an R01, NIH’s oldest and most prestigious grant for biomedical research. He was 34. The average age most M.D./Ph.D.s receive such a grant is 45.

Dzirasa’s lab is a mix of tools both sophisticated and pragmatic. Amid delicate silicone probes that can monitor 1,000 brain cells at a time and a $100,000 cell-signal recording system are $15 Lego sets for building enclosures for mouse experiments and pink and purple jars of drugstore nail polish used to distinguish electrodes.

The mice are not your common household pest: Many are genetically bred as models for human disease to be anxious, aggressive, depressed, or overly friendly. Dzirasa and his lab members implant electrodes, wires thinner than a human hair, into various regions of the mouse brain. They then measure the bursts of electrical activity as the mice run around in small arenas with tiny electrode implants sitting atop their heads like crowns —  doing mousy things like sniffing each other, instigating fights, cowering in fear, or delightedly lapping up sugar water. 

Dzirasa still does delicate implant surgeries on anesthetized mice himself, and teaches others. “Push your chair in as you do that to support your back,” he told one postdoctoral researcher as he observed one of her first surgeries. “You’ll thank me when you’re 40.” 

He ran experiments 12 hours a day, seven days a week when Covid hit, and he was one of the few people allowed to come in. His pace hasn’t let up. He takes breaks to exercise, naps daily, and loves to travel. But there have been costs along the way. There’s stress. And fatigue. He’s divorced with no children.

During an experiment, the cacophony of cells firing from the brain of a busy mouse can be overwhelming. It sounds like a rainstorm, or popcorn popping, but the sounds are impossible for the human ear to interpret. To help, Dzirasa recruited machine learning researchers to his research group. In this noise, they have found clear architecture: patterns that emerge in mice that are resilient to stress, patterns that emerge when mice are anxious, and patterns underlying social behaviors that are absent in mice models of autism. 

“I think the biggest breakthroughs come when people can cross disciplines,” said Michael Summers, a fellow Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UMBC. “He is right at the cutting edge of what parts of the brain are leading to these disorders.” 

Dzirasa is the first to admit his shortcomings. He’s been told he’s taking on problems that seem too big, maybe even insoluble, or that he’s not playing by the rules, by refusing to write papers describing more incremental advances as is customary. He shrugs this off, saying he refuses to have small goals and is not afraid to fail. “I was poor,” he said. “I don’t fear loss.” 

He also doesn’t fear completely changing research directions. An early goal was to develop implantable microchips to treat mental illness. But during a trip to Ghana in 2011, where he was able to explain his research to family members, including his uncle with schizophrenia, they asked a difficult question: How would this help them, or people in other low-income countries? 

The question led him to abandon the idea of therapeutic brain chips, which would require neurosurgeons and MRIs, and look for simpler and cheaper ways to alter brain stimulation. His goal now is to change electrical patterns in the brain by engineering new forms of gap junction proteins that tunnel through the membranes of nerve cells, allowing them to communicate. (The same thing happens in the heart, where electrical pulses synchronize heart cells to cause coordinated beating.) His group has found these new proteins improve communication in the brain circuits of worms and mice.

Dzirasa realizes his work can sound like science fiction. But one of his superpowers, he said, is reaching out to more experienced scientists to vet ideas, ask questions, or request help. These sounding boards have included department chairs, deans of medical schools, former NIH head Francis Collins, and Tom Insel, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health when Dzirasa did a rotation there. 

It’s not just Dzirasa turning to leaders for help. More recently, they’ve turned to him. He’s been on panels and blue ribbon committees to decide how the government should spend the funds remaining in the $3 billion federal BRAIN Initiative and how young scientists could be better supported. In 2016, he shared a stage with former President Barack Obama to discuss the future of medicine. 

What keeps him humble is the challenge he’s set for himself. “In many ways, I’ve been really successful, but I haven’t cured a family or child of mental illness,” he said. “I haven’t done anything close to the scale of what I’d like to achieve.”

Every day, Dzirasa has to walk through a lobby filled with portraits of prominent physicians, all of them white. Once he walks through the door of his lab, it’s a different story. 

“When I got here I was pleasantly surprised, seeing so many people that look like [me],” said Morgan Gallimore, a Black research technician from Michigan who plans to apply to an M.D./Ph.D. program and is one of the many aspiring scientists from underrepresented groups that Dzirasa recruits and mentors. 

Another is Karim Abdelaal, a fifth-year graduate student in the lab. A first-generation college student, he was raised in Bakersfield, Calif., by Egyptian parents who worked low-income jobs. The notion that he might pursue a science career didn’t enter his mind until an introductory psychology course at the University of California, Irvine, piqued his interest in neuroscience. “I knew there were scientists,” he said. “I didn’t know it was something I could be.” 

Abdelaal spent two years working in a lab at MIT — “playing catch-up and feeling internally anxious wondering if this is something I could do,” he said — before joining Dzirasa’s lab. The first thing Dzirasa told him was to slow down, relax, and focus. “The uphill battle is a shared experience here,” Abdelaal said. “When I joined the lab, I thought, these are my people.” 

Doubts about his fitting in now gone, Abdelaal plans to run his own lab one day to study drug addiction, the disease that took the life of one of his brothers.

As welcoming as the lab is, it isn’t always easy. Knowing that their path ahead may be difficult, Dzirasa pushes his mentees like his mentors pushed him. Research projects are dissected and important talks practiced for weeks until they are honed to perfection. “It was iron on iron, we were just sharpening our skills,” said Dalton Hughes, another mentee. “It was very much like looking at game day tape.”

Also a Meyerhoff scholar who majored in chemical engineering at UMBC, Hughes literally followed Dzirasa’s path, earning a M.D./Ph.D. in psychiatry and neurobiology at Duke in Dzirasa’s lab. “I got to interact with a powerhouse in the scientific research community,” said Hughes, who now works at a pharmaceutical company helping ensure diversity in clinical trials. “And he looked like me.”

Dzirasa takes mentoring so seriously, he’s planning to use some of his research funds to start a lab at North Carolina Central University, a historically Black university in Durham, and he insisted on a provision in his Duke employment contract allowing him to spend one day each month at UMBC to meet with students. It was on one of those visits he met Jayo Adegboyo, a senior at UMBC who was inspired to study neuroscience after seeing his father struggle with migraine pain.

After spending a summer in Dzirasa’s lab, he’s been in regular touch to get advice on the medical school admission test, feedback on essays, and guidance on how to choose a graduate program, a lab, and a future path. “I learn a lot about what I should be doing now to put my best foot forward,” he said. “He asks me questions I’m not asking myself.” 

Dzirasa connected Adegboyo to another one of his mentees, Rainbo Hultman, an assistant professor of molecular physiology and biophysics at the University of Iowa Carver School of Medicine who is studying the underpinnings of migraine. Adegboyo has spent two summers doing research there.

Hultman said she long felt like an outsider in science. She’s from a town of 500 people in a rural corner of Iowa. Her family members are farmers and teachers. In college she felt out of place, she said, “like everyone’s parents were doctors and engineers talking about this stuff at the dinner table and I was struggling to keep up.”

Hultman, who is white, went to grad school at Duke but wasn’t sure a life in science was for her — until she joined Dzirasa’s lab as a postdoc. She said she was encouraged to speak up and work in patient advocacy, asking people with mental illness to share their experiences to improve clinical care and improve research.

Being in Dzirasa’s lab meant joining a network she’s now helping to expand. In addition to co-mentoring Adegboyo, she also recruited a grad student to her lab that she’d met through Dzirasa. “He calls her his grand-mentee,” she said.

It’s not just a passion for science that accounts for Dzirasa’s long hours in the lab. It’s also that it’s a safe space, a refuge from the sting of racism. In the lab, he said, “I could work to the point I ignored everything around me.”

Dzirasa argues that one of the biggest roadblocks to success for Black researchers who do make it to faculty jobs is the structural racism baked into science. Going through med school, Dzirasa noticed that the photos in his textbooks of people with sexually transmitted diseases all seemed to be Black, while few of his professors were. As a student, he was interrogated by police, his “Danskos, scrubs, white coat, Duke medical school ID badge, and the oversized anatomy book in my hand” not enough, he wrote in his Cell essay about being Black in science, to convince officers he was not the suspect they sought.  

Dzirasa said he benefited greatly from the Meyerhoff program, but such pipeline programs, established to ensure more students from marginalized backgrounds enter science, are leaky. Dzirasa has seen more Black colleagues than he can count drop out of science. One obstacle for those who graduate with higher degrees, he argues, is the systematic lack of funding for Black scientists. 

To Dzirasa, it’s a system where Black scientists have to be twice, or even four times, as good to achieve the same success. So his weapon has been to be that good — or better. His battleground? The research talks he gives at the nation’s most prestigious universities. “MIT, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, WashU, UPenn, Yale …,” the list goes on and on. 

“I choose to quietly protest this entire academic system with my excellence,” he wrote in the Cell essay. “For the few black trainees in the audience, it is the first time that they see a face that looks like theirs at the podium.”

His writing echoes the exhausting loop that runs ceaselessly in his mind. “I must outwork this system,” he wrote. “I must outlast this system. I must be scientifically sound and full of wit.” 

Earlier in his career, he was one of few Black faces at neuroscience meetings. Despite his professional dress and the conference badge around his neck, he said, people would often seek him out to ask him where the bathrooms were. 

It happens at Duke as well. Colleagues sometimes don’t recognize him in the hallway even after he makes eye contact, or mistake him for Black students in his lab. Once, a staff member asked him what he thought he was doing when he reached for a slice of pizza at a department lunch — in the building he’d worked in for more than a decade. “I have colleagues that have never invited me for a beer or to their house,” he said. 

It’s painful, but Dzirasa shrugs it off, often with a smile. He feels he has to. For a Black man, as he wrote in his 2020 essay, “the idea of making people feel uncomfortable about my presence always feels like career suicide.”

Still, Dzirasa is focusing on being seen for his true self. Now when he gives a talk or wins an award, he sends a standard professional shot of himself but also one he likes much better, where he’s wearing a hoodie. “Every university picks the doctor-looking one,” he said. But in what he sees as a huge win, the NIH Pioneer Award announcement shows him wearing his hoodie. “Everyone is in a white coat on the program and I’m in a hoodie. It makes me so happy. It tells people they can be who they are.” 

Another huge win: The steady stream of his mentees getting their first jobs, and the creation of networking and advocacy groups like Black in Neuro, mean he sees more Black faces at neuroscience meetings. “I can objectively say,” he said, “things are better.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified graduates in a photo from Duke’s May 2023 Ph.D. graduation ceremony.

STAT’s coverage of health inequities is supported by a grant from the Commonwealth Fund. Our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.