The people.

Deveroux Ferguson is a neuroscientist who studies why some brains bounce back from stress and others don't. His laboratory at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Phoenix works on the molecular, cellular and circuit mechanisms of depression and addiction in the brain's reward system, with a focus on the nucleus accumbens and its connections from the prefrontal cortex.

He earned a B.S. in Biology with Honors from Hunter College, CUNY, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University School of Medicine, where he worked with Robert M. Sapolsky on gene-therapy approaches to stress, memory and anxiety. As a postdoctoral fellow with Eric J. Nestler at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, he identified a role for the deacetylase SIRT1 in cocaine and morphine action, the work that seeded his independent program.

He joined the University of Arizona in 2014 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2020. His lab has been continuously funded by the National Institute of Mental Health since 2014. He serves on the editorial board of Molecular Psychiatry, created and directs Principles of Clinical Neuroscience for the College's Pathway Scholars Program, and in 2021 was named one of Cell Press's 1,000 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.