Dasgupta wins ‘genius grant’ for creative and effective harm reduction work

Dr. Nabarun L. Dasgupta, PhD, MPH ’03, was decompressing in his office after sharing with his research team that a longtime colleague had died when he got a call from the “312” area code. He answered, thinking it was from a health department he’d been talking with. Instead, it was someone from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, letting Dasgupta know he was a 2025 MacArthur Fellow—he had won a “genius grant.”

The moment was “really just staggering,” Dasgupta said. “It was tears of grief from one eye and tears of joy from the other.”

The MacArthur Foundation noted Dasgupta, an epidemiologist and harm reduction advocate, combines science with community engagement in a way that lowers deaths and other afflictions from drug use. In 2007, while working on his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, Dasgupta co-founded Project Lazarus. The nonprofit cleared a path for doctors in Wilkes County, N.C. to prescribe naloxone, greatly reducing overdose deaths in the county. He became a senior scientist at UNC’s Injury Prevention Research Center and in 2020 was named the first Gillings Innovation Fellow at UNC. That same year he co-founded Remedy Alliance/For the People, which has removed barriers to naloxone access and become a low- and no-cost wholesaler. Through his Opioid Data Lab, he has developed a nationwide network for checking the ingredients in street drugs.

Two other 2025 MacArthur Fellows also are Yale alumni, astrophysicist Kareem El-Badry, BS ‘16 and archaeologist Kristina Douglass, MPhil ‘12, PhD ‘16.

Dasgupta, 46, said his time at YSPH “was instrumental” in setting him on the course he has pursued and in particular Dr. Robert Heimer, PhD ’98 (pharmacology), professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) and of pharmacology, without whom “I would not be doing this work.” Dasgupta said he remains close with Heimer and was in New Haven earlier this year giving a lecture on the work being done through the Opioid Data Lab.

Heimer, who joked that Dasgupta really came back so they could get pizza at Modern, said he hired Dasgupta as a summer intern on a project studying the emergence of non-medical pharmaceutical opioid use in Maine. Heimer said “Nab saw first-hand the kind of effective work that researchers could do in a community, where they could not just talk to people but bring information to them, provide a sympathetic ear, provide encouragement, all part of the engaged field work that we’ve been doing for years. Doing the research itself is a form of intervention.”

Heimer added that Dasgupta’s approach to research is the opposite of parachuting in, gathering data, and publishing papers. He takes on “syndemic” problems by getting at them across structural, political, and cultural levels. “It’s not just that he’s brilliant. It’s that he enacts that brilliance. He doesn’t just have great ideas, he gets them done. And he gets them done in novel ways,” Heimer said.

Despite his accomplishments, and now a genius grant worth $800,000 over five years, Dasgupta said “the through line of my work … is humility.” He said it was important to see things as they are and not assume “your solutions are going to fit everybody.” He said researchers need to use what he called the immense resources of universities “to answer questions that matter to people.”

Accordingly, he intends to use his MacArthur grant money to “turbocharge” new approaches in his research. “It’s so rare to have completely flexible money,” he said, as opposed to the strict reporting required for typical research grants. “I will make mistakes in how I use this money, I know I will,” he said. “That’s part of the learning—it will give me chances to do new things in new places.”

In particular, he expects to push boundaries in communicating stories about his health research. “As academics we focus so much on our science. What often gets left out is communications and the artistic side or the real-world feel of the work we do,” he said.

For instance, his lab keeps an illustrator on retainer to help develop approaches to how his studies convey results. “I’ll send him a dorky graph and he turns it into a beautiful piece of graphic art,” Dasgupta said. He hopes to bolster such storytelling work. “Exploring the right brain side instead of the left brain, I’m looking forward to that,” he added.