Kafui Dzirasa Speaks at White House Frontiers Conference
DIBS member, Kafui Dzirasa [EDIT: Link no longer works], a researcher at Duke University’s Laboratory for Psychiatric Neuroengineering, spoke at the White House Frontiers Conference Presidential Panel on Brain Science and Medical Information with President Barack Obama. He emphasized the importance of his interdisciplinary approach to brain research, in particular to help those with mental illness. He opens by saying, “I think the big opportunity for us is to think of the brain as an engineered system.” The panel was moderated by Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, who introduced Dr. Dzirasa as “an MD, PhD extraordinaire, he’s a rare bird. He is a psychiatrist. He’s a neuroscientist, and he’s trained as an engineer as well.” You can watch the clip here or the entire panel discussion here. More of Dr. Dzirasa's lab's work can be found here.
The White House Frontiers Conference was in Pittsburgh on October 13th, 2016, hosted jointly by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. President Obama’s administration announced in conjunction with the conference that an additional $300M of new research funding would be awarded across the five “frontiers” of research that were the focus of the conference, according the the Pittsburch Post-Gazette. $70M of that will be devoted to brain research.
Congratulations to Dr. Dzirasa!