Alumni Profile: Yasmin Hurd '82

A fascination with the brain

Trace her career back to its roots, and you'll find Yasmin Hurd in a work-study job caring for rodents in a BU psychology lab. "I would see all the things they were doing with the mice and rats, and I'd ask 40 million questions," she recalled. Finally, professor Peter Donovick invited her to join the research.

" He completely turned my life around," said Hurd, who until then had thought about becoming a physician. "He opened my eyes to what research really was, and to my fascination with the brain."

Today, Hurd is a prominent neuroscientist, studying the relationships among mental illness, drug addiction and changes in the brain. Her work has led her to Sweden, where she serves as associate professor and director of graduate studies in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience, psychiatry section, at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute.

The reasons people behave the way they do, and the links between behavior and the brain, have always intrigued Hurd. She first visited Karolinska while working as a graduate student at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York. She wanted to learn about a new technique, developed in Sweden, for studying neurochemical activity in the brains of live animals. She planned to stay only briefly, but "a few months turned into a few years," she laughed.
Hurd earned a PhD at Karolinksa in neuropsycho-pharmacology -- the study of how drugs affect behavior and the brain. After several years spent working in the U.S. at the National Institutes of Health, she accepted a teaching post at Karolinska in 1993.

Hurd and her research group examine deceased patients who suffered from various psychiatric disorders, neurological ailments such as Parkinson's disease, or drug addiction. "We try to identify where in the brain we see abnormalities in specific genes, in specific, discrete brain regions," she said. They also use in vivo methods to study the living brain with the same range of conditions.

One of their goals is to understand the brain abnormalities in drug abusers and individuals with mental illness, since these two groups share many behavioral disturbances. The long term objective is to learn how to treat these conditions -- perhaps, for example, treating drug abuse with certain medications that prove useful for the treatment of psychosis.

Hurd speaks fluent Swedish and conducts much of her work in English. She stays in close touch with colleagues and friends around the world, including BU classmates Amy Lorowitz and Joanne Fickbolm Bennett, both '82, whom she said have been major supporters in every aspect of her life. Sometimes, she said, it's easy to forget she's not living in the U.S. Hurd felt much more like a foreigner when she first arrived in Sweden in 1985. Back then, she explained, Stockholm was a far less cosmopolitan city; Hurd often went days without seeing another person with dark skin. She stopped riding the subway because, on weekends, men who'd had a few too many drinks would walk up to her and touch her skin and hair.

But in many ways, Hurd found from the start that it was easier to be African American in Sweden than in the U.S. "In Sweden, there were no negative associations with people being black," she said, and no one she met had trouble believing she was a scientist. "There, they just looked at me as American, which meant that you were supposed to be the best."

A demanding work schedule makes it hard to get out of the lab as much as she'd like, but Hurd enjoys her apartment near the water in Stockholm and takes pleasure in going out with friends, playing tennis and practicing yoga. She also loves to draw human figures and paint landscapes. Beyond Sweden, trips to lecture at professional conferences around the globe offer many chances to indulge a curiosity that burns as brightly as it did at BU.

"After I give a talk," she said, "I drive off and explore the world."

-- Merrill Oliver Douglas, MA '82