Neuroscience Has A Whiteness Problem. This Research Project Aims To Fix It

Mental illness can run in families. And Dr. Kafui Dzirasa grew up in one of these families.

His close relatives include people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression. As a medical student, he learned about the ones who'd been committed to psychiatric hospitals or who "went missing" and were discovered in alleyways.

Dzirasa decided to dedicate his career to "figuring out how to make science relevant to ultimately help my own family."

He became a psychiatrist and researcher at Duke University and began to study the links between genes and brain disorders.

Then Dzirasa realized something: "I was studying genes that were specifically related to illness in folks of European ancestry."

His family had migrated from West Africa, which meant anything he discovered might not apply to them.