Meet the UNC street drug scientist awarded a ‘genius’ grant for his lifesaving work

By Taylor Knopf

At a time when the nation’s drug supply has become increasingly unpredictable, Nabarun Dasgupta uses what he calls “science in service” to bring some clarity to the chaos. 

Dasgupta has spent two decades using data to tell the story behind street drugs and their hidden dangers. He documents how people use those substances as a way of reducing the harm done by them. 

Dasgupta’s career has brought scientific rigor to the practice of harm reduction, an approach to drug use that seeks to minimize its ill effects while allowing users to stay alive and well, and receive support.  

Harm reduction efforts for combating opioid overdoses include, for example, distributing naloxone — an opioid overdose reversal drug — or sterile drug use supplies to prevent the spread of diseases such as hepatitis C and HIV. More recently, harm reduction workers have been using testing strips to detect harmful additives lurking in the street supply — like the potent opioid fentanyl. 

These interventions acknowledge the realities of drug use without judging the people who use them, all while helping them stay alive.  

“I think harm reduction is a problem-solving strategy based on the ancient wisdom that all lives have dignity and value, regardless of what they put in their bodies,” Dasgupta said. 

From the Appalachian foothills of Wilkes County — where he helped launch one of the country’s first community naloxone programs — to a drug checking lab at UNC Chapel Hill where he and his team track and report the chemical makeup of street drugs in real time, Dasgupta’s work has redefined the public health response to the overdose crisis in North Carolina and beyond.

Now, the epidemiologist and street drug researcher has been named a 2025 MacArthur Fellow, honored for his innovation, collaboration and compassion that has saved countless lives. 

This year, Dasgupta is the only North Carolinian among the 22 people awarded what is known as the “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, which comes with $800,000 to spend as he sees fit. 

“I didn’t even know I was under consideration,” Dasgupta said. “You’re just doing the work, but it’s one of these rare moments where you realize some people have been paying attention the whole time.”

MacArthur fellows are chosen through a rigorous, secretive process by which potential candidates are selected by an invited group of anonymous nominators. The no-strings-attached award goes to “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential,” according to the foundation. 

“I genuinely can’t think of anyone more deserving,” said Elyse Powell, director of the North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, an organization that participates in sending street drug samples to Dasgupta’s lab. “His lab has been an enormous resource for us, and I just see every day how his work is saving lives. It’s getting real information out to people so that they can protect themselves.”

Drug checking lab

In 2020, Dasgupta got a call from his friend and colleague Louise Vincent, director of the Greensboro-based harm reduction organization North Carolina Survivors Union, asking if he could help set up their new drug checking machine. Dasgupta and his team trained the Greensboro harm reduction workers on how to use it and agreed to be the back-up lab for additional testing. 

The question remained: How would they get street drug samples from Greensboro to Dasgupta’s lab in Chapel Hill? It was the height of the coronavirus pandemic. Dasgupta was in his car waiting on a drive-thru COVID test — holding a zip-top bag with instructions, a swab and test tube — when he had an idea. 

They could make similar testing kits for street drugs and mail them.

“I thought, ‘Wait, if we can do this with viruses, then surely we can do with drugs,’” he said. “We figured out the right rules and how to be in compliance with state and federal laws.

“What was developed as a local solution had the ability to scale to a national level.”

That collaboration with Vincent became the start of something much larger. Together, they built a drug checking model that has reshaped how public health workers across the country monitor the street drug supply in real time. 

Now, the Street Drug Analysis Lab at UNC tests drugs mailed in from around the U.S., and the results are posted anonymously to the lab’s website multiple times per day. The lab has tested about 17,000 samples from 185 harm reduction programs in 41 states. It has detected 458 unique substances. 

Vincent, who was a fearless and determined advocate for people who used drugs, died just days before Dasgupta received that surprise phone call from the MacArthur Foundation.

“I can’t help but feel like it was her on the phone,” Dasgupta said, “Reaching out and being like, ‘You have to keep doing this work. We’re not done.’”

Why it matters

The street drug supply changes constantly. New and sometimes harmful additives find their way into the supply — from caffeine to synthetic opioids to, more recently, xylazine, an animal tranquilizer. Drug checking as a harm reduction measure has been a key feature of the response to substance use in Europe for some time and is just now starting to take off in the U.S. 

Knowing what’s in the supply gives people who use drugs the ability to make informed decisions about how and if they will use a drug. Maybe someone will decide to use less or throw it away — or use the drugs in the presence of another person rather than alone. Dasgupta’s lab analyzes drugs that are voluntarily sent by participants of harm reduction groups. 

Many times, people want them examined because they had an unusual reaction. 

“It’s hard to describe the relief people feel when there’s actually just an explanation for what they experienced, and it helps them make better choices,” said Powell, director of the NC Harm Reduction Coalition, which operates syringe exchange programs from the mountains to the coast.

This knowledge also allows public health and harm reduction workers to respond to emerging contaminants in real time. They can distribute new test strips, simple disposable devices used to test for a single substance, to their participants. They can get proper wound care supplies to communities and send updated guidance to local and regional EMS workers and emergency room staff who may encounter someone overdosing from a drug contaminated with a new substance.

“Every new wave of the epidemic has caught us on our back foot. By the time we’re talking about it, it’s so far out of the gate and we’re scrambling,” Powell said. “With this surveillance, if a new additive is popping up in one part of the state, public health responders can know that in real time and alert workers in other parts of the state.”

Dasgupta’s award comes at a time when harm reduction interventions are being undermined by President Donald Trump’s administration. The administration has cut funding to programs, and in July Trump issued an executive order that claimed that “so-called ‘harm reduction’ efforts” only facilitate illegal drug use. 

Powell was pleased to see the MacArthur Foundation validate harm reduction work through this award. 

“The fact that a project inside harm reduction was named for a MacArthur fellowship is really important,” Powell said. “I think it really acknowledges the importance and value and genius inside harm reduction.”

Dasgupta called the federal-level conversations about harm reduction “tone deaf.” When he talks to local leaders and health workers who are addressing the impacts of drug use in their communities, he said they see harm reduction strategies as routine caregiving. 

“It doesn’t seem as controversial when you’re actually talking to people who are doing the work,” he said. “It kind of feels like it’s being made out to be more controversial, at a rhetorical, political propaganda level, but it’s not… It seems like a really big disconnect.”

For Dasgupta, harm reduction has never been an abstract policy idea — it’s always been about people. 

How it started

When Dasgupta was in college, he and his mother, Nandita Dasgupta, talked about his thoughts on pursuing a medical degree. 

“He once told me, ‘If I go to med school, I’ll be able to help one person at a time. But I want to help a lot of people at a time,’” she said. “So that was already working behind his mind.”

Then, Dasgupta dreamed of going to Thailand to study mosquitoes and the viruses they spread. That fascination with viral infections and how they move through communities eventually led him to researching HIV and hepatitis C, which can spread through injection drug use.

A summer internship in college took him to his home state of Maine, where he assisted on a study of OxyContin abuse. In the early 2000s, the opioid crisis was quietly spreading in small towns around the country. Around that same time, in 2002, Dasgupta met Tony Givens, a harm reduction outreach worker who was in recovery from drug use. Givens became a mentor and friend, and Dasgupta credits him with helping him see the human side of the drug use problem. 

Two years later, Givens died of a drug overdose. 

In processing that loss, Dasgupta turned to the data. He wanted to know how many others were dying from drug overdoses, but at that time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t clearly report drug overdose deaths. They were lumped into broad categories of mortality statistics. 

So Dasgupta began to do the work himself, painstakingly sorting the data to bring visibility to the mounting crisis.

His focus shifted to how to best help the people behind the statistics. Dasgupta helped found two nonprofit organizations that help get the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone into the hands of people who use street drugs and also to pain patients, who are often prescribed opioids. 

Getting naloxone into communities

In 2007, he co-founded Project Lazarus in Wilkes County, which had the third-highest rate of opioid overdose deaths in the country at that time. The project got naloxone into the hands of pain patients and those who use street drugs and saved lives. 

“Today, [naloxone] is so widely embraced, but at that time, it was still very stigmatized, happening underground in many places. That work with Project Lazarus really helped bring naloxone into the mainstream,” said Roxanne Saucier, Dasgupta’s wife. She also works as a harm reduction and drug policy consultant. 

The two met in 2009 at the annual United Nations’ Commission on Narcotics Drugs meeting in Vienna, where Dasgupta shared the successes of Project Lazarus. Project Lazurus also got the attention of the U.S. drug czar at the time, Gil Kerlikowske, who visited Wilkesboro to hold a forum about naloxone where he said it was “a pioneering example in community-based public health for the rest of the country.”

To ensure harm reduction organizations and community health departments had access to affordable naloxone, Dasgupta also co-founded a nonprofit called Remedy Alliance/For The People, which buys and distributes low-cost naloxone directly to the organizations that need it. 

“He’s always had a knack for marrying the harm reduction approach with his own entrepreneurial spirit and innovative ideas,” Saucier said. “He’s not afraid to experiment and try something new. Often he’ll do it and then worry about the funding later. Then the funding does come because what he’s doing generates so much interest, and pretty quickly people can see that it’s valuable.”

The MacArthur grant gives Dasgupta some flexibility as he looks to future projects and he already has some ideas.

“I would like to focus on having a hemispheric capability to understand how drugs, drug use and drug use harms are distributed from Canada to Chile,” he said. “What we see here is sometimes similar, sometimes dissimilar to what happens in other parts of our hemisphere — particularly in Latin America… So we have a responsibility to share what we are seeing with our colleagues all throughout Central and South America.”

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