Chemist of the Mind

From books by candlelight in 1990s Kashmir to designing brain tracers in America, a scientist's unlikely path reshapes how medicine sees the mind and offers new hope for millions worldwide.

- Dr. Waseem Ahmad

In a sleepy Kashmir village, a young stargazer looked up at the night sky, chasing questions larger than his world: Why does the mind forget? Where does illness hide in the brain? What lies beneath thought itself?

That Pulwama boy, Mudasir Maqbool, is now a scientist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), where he crafts radiotracers: tiny chemical tools that light up the brain's hidden processes.

His work helps researchers study Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, depression and other diseases that remain among the greatest medical mysteries of our time.

In the sterile calm of NIH's Molecular Imaging Branch in Bethesda, Maryland, Dr. Mudasir's path has been anything but linear. But his trajectory is reshaping how scientists explore the human mind.

Growing up in the 1990s in Kashmir, a region long marred by political disturbances, Dr. Mudasir was no stranger to uncertainty. Electricity was unreliable. Internet was scarce. Classrooms were sometimes interrupted by clashes outside.

But what he lacked in resources, he made up for in resolve. "Books were my refuge," he said. "There was so much I didn't understand, but I knew that science could answer the big questions."