Kafui Dzirasa, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Dzirasa is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, neurobiology, and neurosurgery, and the K. Ranga Rama Krishnan Associate Professor at Duke University and an investigator in the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

Kafui Dzirasa is exploring the relationship between psychiatric disorders and disruptions in organized electrical activity in large cortical and subcortical networks in the brain. Dzirasa and his team base their research on the theory that emotions have distinct signatures reflected by such activity. The team uses mouse models and approaches from psychiatry, neurophysiology, and biomedical engineering to demonstrate that disruptions in these activity patterns are a convergence of biological factors for psychiatric disorders and to study whether normalizing electrical activity patterns in disease states could restore “normal” behavior. This work has implications for understanding potential treatments for disorders such as depression.