Scholars@Duke
Kafui Dzirasa

Kafui Dzirasa

A. Eugene and Marie Washington Presidential Distinguished Professor
Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Behavioral Medicine & Neurosciences
kafui.dzirasa@duke.edu
Box 3209 Medctr, Durham, NC 27710
Bryan Research Bldg, Room 361, Durham, NC 27710

Selected Publications

Developing algorithmic psychiatry via multi-level spanning computational models.

Journal Article Cell Rep Med · May 20, 2025 Modern psychiatry faces challenges in translating neurobiological insights into treatments for severe illnesses. The mid-20th century witnessed the rise of molecular mechanisms as pathophysiological and treatment models, with recent holistic proposals keep ... Full text Link to item Cite

Sex-specific regulation of microglial MyD88 in HMGB1-Induced anxiety phenotype in mice.

Journal Article Neurobiol Stress · May 2025 Stress is a significant risk factor for the development and recurrence of anxiety disorders. Stress can profoundly impact the immune system, and lead to microglial functional alterations in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain region involved in th ... Full text Link to item Cite

The neuroscience of mental illness: Building toward the future.

Journal Article Cell · October 17, 2024 Mental illnesses arise from dysfunction in the brain. Although numerous extraneural factors influence these illnesses, ultimately, it is the science of the brain that will lead to novel therapies. Meanwhile, our understanding of this complex organ is incom ... Full text Link to item Cite

Electome network factors: Capturing emotional brain networks related to health and disease.

Journal Article Cell Rep Methods · January 22, 2024 Therapeutic development for mental disorders has been slow despite the high worldwide prevalence of illness. Unfortunately, cellular and circuit insights into disease etiology have largely failed to generalize across individuals that carry the same diagnos ... Full text Link to item Cite

Ethical, legal, and policy challenges in field-based neuroimaging research using emerging portable MRI technologies: guidance for investigators and for oversight.

Journal Article J Law Biosci · 2024 Researchers are rapidly developing and deploying highly portable MRI technology to conduct field-based research. The new technology will widen access to include new investigators in remote and unconventional settings and will facilitate greater inclusion o ... Full text Link to item Cite

An aging-susceptible circadian rhythm controls cutaneous antiviral immunity.

Journal Article JCI Insight · October 23, 2023 Aged skin is prone to viral infections, but the mechanisms responsible for this immunosenescent immune risk are unclear. We observed that aged murine and human skin expressed reduced levels of antiviral proteins (AVPs) and circadian regulators, including B ... Full text Link to item Cite

Structural Racism in Psychiatric Research Careers: Eradicating Barriers to a More Diverse Workforce.

Journal Article Am J Psychiatry · September 1, 2023 Investigators from minoritized backgrounds are underrepresented in psychiatric research. That underrepresentation contributes to disparities in outcomes of access to mental health care. Drawing on lived experience, scholarly qualitative reports, and empiri ... Full text Link to item Cite

Estimating a brain network predictive of stress and genotype with supervised autoencoders.

Journal Article J R Stat Soc Ser C Appl Stat · August 2023 Targeted brain stimulation has the potential to treat mental illnesses. We develop an approach to help design protocols by identifying relevant multi-region electrical dynamics. Our approach models these dynamics as a superposition of latent networks, wher ... Full text Link to item Cite

Juneteenth in STEMM and the barriers to equitable science.

Journal Article Cell · June 8, 2023 We are 52 Black scientists. Here, we establish the context of Juneteenth in STEMM and discuss the barriers Black scientists face, the struggles they endure, and the lack of recognition they receive. We review racism's history in science and provide institu ... Full text Link to item Cite

Gender, Racial, and Ethnic and Inequities in Receipt of Multiple National Institutes of Health Research Project Grants.

Journal Article JAMA Netw Open · February 1, 2023 IMPORTANCE: Diversity in the biomedical research workforce is essential for addressing complex health problems. Female investigators and investigators from underrepresented ethnic and racial groups generate novel, impactful, and innovative research, yet th ... Full text Link to item Cite

Advancing workforce diversity by leveraging the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program.

Journal Article J Clin Transl Sci · 2023 Clinical trials continue to disproportionately underrepresent people of color. Increasing representation of diverse backgrounds among clinical research personnel has the potential to yield greater representation in clinical trials and more efficacious medi ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

A novel cross-institutional college internship program to train future diverse leaders in clinical research with data-driven approaches to assess impact.

Journal Article Front Pharmacol · 2023 The field of Clinical Research, like many other scientific disciplines, has struggled to recruit and retain talented researchers from diverse communities. While there is a strong history of documenting the problem, having a diverse and inclusive workforce ... Full text Link to item Cite

Prenatal environmental stressors impair postnatal microglia function and adult behavior in males.

Journal Article Cell Rep · August 2, 2022 Gestational exposure to environmental toxins and socioeconomic stressors is epidemiologically linked to neurodevelopmental disorders with strong male bias, such as autism. We model these prenatal risk factors in mice by co-exposing pregnant dams to an envi ... Full text Link to item Cite

Marc G. Caron (1946-2022).

Journal Article Neuron · July 6, 2022 Full text Link to item Cite

Brain-wide electrical dynamics encode individual appetitive social behavior.

Journal Article Neuron · May 18, 2022 The architecture whereby activity across many brain regions integrates to encode individual appetitive social behavior remains unknown. Here we measure electrical activity from eight brain regions as mice engage in a social preference assay. We then use ma ... Full text Link to item Cite

Regulation of sensorimotor gating via Disc1/Huntingtin-mediated Bdnf transport in the cortico-striatal circuit.

Journal Article Mol Psychiatry · March 2022 Sensorimotor information processing underlies normal cognitive and behavioral traits and has classically been evaluated through prepulse inhibition (PPI) of a startle reflex. PPI is a behavioral dimension deregulated in several neurological and psychiatric ... Full text Link to item Cite

Understanding the biological basis of psychiatric disease: What's next?

Journal Article Cell · January 6, 2022 Psychiatric disease is one of the greatest health challenges of our time. The pipeline for conceptually novel therapeutics remains low, in part because uncovering the biological mechanisms of psychiatric disease has been difficult. We asked experts researc ... Full text Link to item Cite

Measuring Nonapoptotic Caspase Activity with a Transgenic Reporter in Mice.

Journal Article eNeuro · 2022 The protease caspase-3 is a key mediator of apoptotic programmed cell death. But weak or transient caspase activity can contribute to neuronal differentiation, axonal pathfinding, and synaptic long-term depression. Despite the importance of sublethal, or n ... Full text Link to item Cite

Directed Spectral Measures Improve Latent Network Models Of Neural Populations.

Journal Article Adv Neural Inf Process Syst · December 2021 Systems neuroscience aims to understand how networks of neurons distributed throughout the brain mediate computational tasks. One popular approach to identify those networks is to first calculate measures of neural activity (e.g. power spectra) from multip ... Link to item Cite

Revising the a Priori Hypothesis: Systemic Racism Has Penetrated Scientific Funding.

Journal Article Cell · October 29, 2020 To manifest our sincerest aspirations to "enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability," the US biomedical research enterprise must directly confront the reality of structural racism in scientific funding and the widespread denial of it ... Full text Link to item Cite

Missing in Action: African Ancestry Brain Research.

Journal Article Neuron · August 5, 2020 Individuals of African ancestry have been starkly underrepresented in the pursuit of personalized medicine for brain illnesses. The African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative will seek to generate much-needed brain gene and protein expression profil ... Full text Link to item Cite

For Black Scientists, the Sorrow Is Also Personal.

Journal Article Cell · July 23, 2020 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. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Is depression a disorder of electrical brain networks?

Journal Article Neuropsychopharmacology · January 2020 Full text Link to item Cite

Acceptability and perceived effectiveness of approaches to support biomedical doctoral student wellness: One size doesn⇔t fit all

Journal Article International Journal of Doctoral Studies · January 1, 2020 Aim/Purpose National and international survey studies have begun to identify heightened levels of depression, anxiety, and burnout among doctoral students. Nevertheless, little research has been done to evaluate which interventions may support doctoral stu ... Full text Cite

Applying the Stress Process Model to Stress-Burnout and Stress-Depression Relationships in Biomedical Doctoral Students: A Cross-Sectional Pilot Study.

Journal Article CBE Life Sci Educ · December 2019 Although doctoral students in the biomedical sciences have been recognized as a population at particular risk for mental health problems such as burnout and depression, little research has been conducted to identify candidate targets for intervention. To t ... Full text Link to item Cite

A Common Neuroendocrine Substrate for Diverse General Anesthetics and Sleep.

Journal Article Neuron · June 5, 2019 How general anesthesia (GA) induces loss of consciousness remains unclear, and whether diverse anesthetic drugs and sleep share a common neural pathway is unknown. Previous studies have revealed that many GA drugs inhibit neural activity through targeting ... Full text Link to item Cite

Burnout and Mental Health Problems in Biomedical Doctoral Students.

Journal Article CBE Life Sci Educ · June 2019 Although burnout and mental health problems may adversely impact quality of scientific research, academic productivity, and attrition in biomedical doctoral training programs, very little research has been done on this topic. Recent studies have used brief ... Full text Link to item Cite

Brain-wide Electrical Spatiotemporal Dynamics Encode Depression Vulnerability.

Journal Article Cell · March 22, 2018 Brain-wide fluctuations in local field potential oscillations reflect emergent network-level signals that mediate behavior. Cracking the code whereby these oscillations coordinate in time and space (spatiotemporal dynamics) to represent complex behaviors w ... Full text Link to item Cite

A Shared Vision for Machine Learning in Neuroscience.

Journal Article J Neurosci · February 14, 2018 With ever-increasing advancements in technology, neuroscientists are able to collect data in greater volumes and with finer resolution. The bottleneck in understanding how the brain works is consequently shifting away from the amount and type of data we ca ... Full text Link to item Cite

Neuronal suppression causing depression?

Journal Article Science Translational Medicine · January 24, 2018 Suppressed dopaminergic activity in a specic brain area may play a causal role in depression. ... Full text Cite

Brain leak, mind bleak

Journal Article Science Translational Medicine · December 6, 2017 Full text Cite

The new stars of synaptic regulation

Journal Article Science Translational Medicine · October 25, 2017 Astrocytes regulate synaptic function in amygdala. ... Full text Cite

In the mood for food

Journal Article Science Translational Medicine · September 13, 2017 A neuronal subpopulation in the central amygdala promotes food consumption. ... Full text Cite

A brilliant approach to study the basis of intelligence?

Journal Article Science Translational Medicine · August 2, 2017 Genome-wide association studies have become powerful tools for investigating the genetic bases of several disorders. In order to understand the biological mechanisms that may contribute to disease prevention, recent studies have investigated the genetic pr ... Full text Cite

When they go low, we go high.

Journal Article Sci Transl Med · June 21, 2017 High-frequency electrical interference can be used to drive activity deep in the brain. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Rat intersubjective decisions are encoded by frequency-specific oscillatory contexts.

Journal Article Brain Behav · June 2017 INTRODUCTION: It is unknown how the brain coordinates decisions to withstand personal costs in order to prevent other individuals' distress. Here we test whether local field potential (LFP) oscillations between brain regions create "neural contexts" that s ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Working memory: The real VIP.

Journal Article Sci Transl Med · May 10, 2017 Interneurons expressing VIP may play a causal role in working memory. ... Full text Link to item Cite

The neural substrates of super memory.

Journal Article Sci Transl Med · March 29, 2017 Specific neural networks support superior memory in world-class memory athletes. ... Full text Link to item Cite

Targeting EEG/LFP synchrony with neural nets

Conference Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems · January 1, 2017 We consider the analysis of Electroencephalography (EEG) and Local Field Potential (LFP) datasets, which are "big" in terms of the size of recorded data but rarely have sufficient labels required to train complex models (e.g., conventional deep learning me ... Cite

Cross-spectral factor analysis

Conference Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems · January 1, 2017 In neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia or depression, there is often a disruption in the way that regions of the brain synchronize with one another. To facilitate understanding of network-level synchronization between brain regions, we introdu ... Cite

Increased Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor 5 Signaling Underlies Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder-like Behavioral and Striatal Circuit Abnormalities in Mice.

Journal Article Biol Psychiatry · October 1, 2016 BACKGROUND: Development of treatments for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is hampered by a lack of mechanistic understanding about this prevalent neuropsychiatric condition. Although circuit changes such as elevated frontostriatal activity are linked t ... Full text Link to item Cite

Dysregulation of Prefrontal Cortex-Mediated Slow-Evolving Limbic Dynamics Drives Stress-Induced Emotional Pathology.

Journal Article Neuron · July 20, 2016 Circuits distributed across cortico-limbic brain regions compose the networks that mediate emotional behavior. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) regulates ultraslow (<1 Hz) dynamics across these networks, and PFC dysfunction is implicated in stress-related illne ... Full text Link to item Cite

Altered mGluR5-Homer scaffolds and corticostriatal connectivity in a Shank3 complete knockout model of autism.

Journal Article Nat Commun · May 10, 2016 Human neuroimaging studies suggest that aberrant neural connectivity underlies behavioural deficits in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but the molecular and neural circuit mechanisms underlying ASDs remain elusive. Here, we describe a complete knockout m ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

Animal models of psychiatric disorders.

Journal Article Neuroscience · May 3, 2016 Full text Link to item Cite

Daytime spikes in dopaminergic activity drive rapid mood-cycling in mice.

Journal Article Mol Psychiatry · November 2015 Disruptions in circadian rhythms and dopaminergic activity are involved in the pathophysiology of bipolar disorder, though their interaction remains unclear. Moreover, a lack of animal models that display spontaneous cycling between mood states has hindere ... Full text Link to item Cite

Tuning the Brain-Gut Axis in Health and Disease

Journal Article Current Stem Cell Reports · March 1, 2015 Recent breakthroughs in gut microbiome-derived technologies and therapies, coupled with the lack of invasiveness associated with them, provide attractive routes of biomarker and therapeutic development. Alongside such breakthroughs, an ever-growing body of ... Full text Cite

Incubating the research independence of a medical scientist training program graduate: a case study.

Journal Article Acad Med · February 2015 PROBLEM: Physician-scientists play a critical role in discovering new biological knowledge and translating findings into medical practices that can improve clinical outcomes. Collectively, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its affiliated Medical ... Full text Link to item Cite

Localization of Metal Electrodes in the Intact Rat Brain Using Registration of 3D Microcomputed Tomography Images to a Magnetic Resonance Histology Atlas.

Journal Article eNeuro · 2015 Simultaneous neural recordings taken from multiple areas of the rodent brain are garnering growing interest due to the insight they can provide about spatially distributed neural circuitry. The promise of such recordings has inspired great progress in meth ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

GP kernels for cross-spectrum analysis

Conference Advances in neural information processing systems · 2015 Cite

Prefrontal cortex reactivity underlies trait vulnerability to chronic social defeat stress.

Journal Article Nat Commun · July 29, 2014 Psychological stress contributes to the onset and exacerbation of nearly all neuropsychiatric disorders. Individual differences in stress-regulatory circuits can therefore dramatically affect vulnerability to these illnesses. Here we identify neural circui ... Full text Link to item Cite

Analysis of Brain States from Multi-Region LFP Time-Series

Conference Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems · 2014 Cite

On the Relationship Between LFP & Spiking Data

Conference Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems · 2014 Cite

Cortical-amygdalar circuit dysfunction in a genetic mouse model of serotonin deficiency.

Journal Article J Neurosci · March 6, 2013 Although the majority of first-line antidepressants increase brain serotonin and rare polymorphisms in tryptophan hydroxlase-2 (Tph2), the rate-limiting enzyme in the brain serotonin synthesis pathway, have been identified in cohorts of subjects with major ... Full text Link to item Cite

Cortical control of affective networks.

Journal Article J Neurosci · January 16, 2013 Transcranial magnetic stimulation and deep brain stimulation have emerged as therapeutic modalities for treatment refractory depression; however, little remains known regarding the circuitry that mediates the therapeutic effect of these approaches. Here we ... Full text Link to item Cite

How does deep brain stimulation work?

Journal Article Biol Psychiatry · December 1, 2012 Full text Link to item Cite

Increasing the validity of experimental models for depression.

Journal Article Ann N Y Acad Sci · August 2012 Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a central nervous system disorder characterized by the culmination of profound disturbances in mood and affective regulation. Animal models serve as a powerful tool for investigating the neurobiological mechanisms underly ... Full text Link to item Cite

Impaired limbic gamma oscillatory synchrony during anxiety-related behavior in a genetic mouse model of bipolar mania.

Journal Article J Neurosci · April 27, 2011 Alterations in anxiety-related processing are observed across many neuropsychiatric disorders, including bipolar disorder. Though polymorphisms in a number of circadian genes confer risk for this disorder, little is known about how changes in circadian gen ... Full text Link to item Cite

Chronic in vivo multi-circuit neurophysiological recordings in mice.

Journal Article J Neurosci Methods · January 30, 2011 While genetically modified mice have become a widely accepted tool for modeling the influence of gene function on the manifestation of neurological and psychiatric endophenotypes, only modest headway has been made in characterizing the functional circuit c ... Full text Link to item Cite

Lithium ameliorates nucleus accumbens phase-signaling dysfunction in a genetic mouse model of mania.

Journal Article J Neurosci · December 1, 2010 Polymorphisms in circadian genes such as CLOCK convey risk for bipolar disorder. While studies have begun to elucidate the molecular mechanism whereby disruption of Clock alters cellular function within mesolimbic brain regions, little remains known about ... Full text Link to item Cite

Noradrenergic control of cortico-striato-thalamic and mesolimbic cross-structural synchrony.

Journal Article J Neurosci · May 5, 2010 Although normal dopaminergic tone has been shown to be essential for the induction of cortico-striatal and mesolimbic theta oscillatory activity, the influence of norepinephrine on these brain networks remains relatively unknown. To address this question, ... Full text Link to item Cite

Hyperdopaminergia and NMDA receptor hypofunction disrupt neural phase signaling.

Journal Article J Neurosci · June 24, 2009 Neural phase signaling has gained attention as a putative coding mechanism through which the brain binds the activity of neurons across distributed brain areas to generate thoughts, percepts, and behaviors. Neural phase signaling has been shown to play a r ... Full text Link to item Cite

Persistent hyperdopaminergia decreases the peak frequency of hippocampal theta oscillations during quiet waking and REM sleep.

Journal Article PLoS One · 2009 Long-term changes in dopaminergic signaling are thought to underlie the pathophysiology of a number of psychiatric disorders. Several conditions are associated with cognitive deficits such as disturbances in attention processes and learning and memory, sug ... Full text Link to item Cite

Baseline hippocampal theta oscillation speeds correlate with rate of operant task acquisition.

Journal Article Behav Brain Res · June 26, 2008 Many lines of evidence indicate that theta rhythm, a prominent neural oscillatory mode found in the mammalian hippocampus, plays a key role in the acquisition, processing, and retrieval of memories. However, a predictive neurophysiological feature of the b ... Full text Link to item Cite

Chronic recordings in transgenic mice

Chapter · January 1, 2007 Previous chapters of this book have highlighted technical advances made in recording ensembles of neurons in primates and rats. These advances have created a novel window through which to study brain function, allowing us to interpret an ever-growing body ... Full text Cite

Dopaminergic control of sleep-wake states.

Journal Article J Neurosci · October 11, 2006 Dopamine depletion is involved in the pathophysiology of Parkinson's disease, whereas hyperdopaminergia may play a fundamental role in generating endophenotypes associated with schizophrenia. Sleep disturbances are known to occur in both schizophrenia and ... Full text Link to item Cite

Bioavailability of cable insulating oil to soil biota

Journal Article Battelle Memorial Institute International in Situ and on Site Bioreclamation Symposium Proceedings · December 1, 1999 The impact of cable insulating oil at various concentrations of non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL) and over increasing oil-soil contact times on soil microbial respiration and survival of earthworms in soil was studied. The presence of a NAPL increased the mi ... Cite