Scientist on front lines of overdose crisis receives MacArthur 'genius' award
toggle caption Pearson Ripley/Photo provided by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
By his own description, Nabarun Dasgupta digs through drug overdose data obsessively, scrutinizing the latest numbers from around the U.S. for clues about America's deadly overdose crisis.
In 2024, the researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was one of the first scientists in the country to realize something new was happening: "I was going through [reports] state-by-state and all the graphs kind of pointed downwards," Dasgupta told NPR.
Fatal overdoses were dropping fast, the biggest, most hopeful shift in decades.
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