About

Dr. Beck Brachman is a pioneer in the field of preventative psychopharmacology, developing drugs to enhance stress resilience and prevent mental illness.

Current treatments for mood disorders only suppress symptoms without addressing the underlying disease, and there are no known cures. Alexigents, a novel drug class that enhances stress resilience, would be the first medicines to prevent psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression.

Dr. Brachman is a neuroscientist, Executive Director & Cofounder of a Focused Research Organization (currently in stealth), and a Visiting Fellow at Cornell Tech (Cornell University). She is supported by Schmidt Futures & Convergent Research for work on scientific innovation. She also spearheads Sogo, a social impact initiative developing novel outcomes-backed financial instruments to directly incentivize public goods, such as generic drug repurposing and climate change mitigation.

Brachman obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from Columbia University, prior to which she was a fellow at the National Institutes of Health, where she discovered that immune cells carry a memory of psychological stress and that white blood cells can act as antidepressants and resilience-enhancers. She is a TED Fellow, a SpecTech BRAINS Fellow, Helena Brain Trust member, and former NYCEDC Entrepreneurship Lab Fellow. Brachman's research has been featured in The Atlantic, WIRED and Business Insider, and her work was described by Dr. George Slavich on NPR as a "moonshot project that is very much needed in the mental health arena."

Brachman is also a writer and previously served as the director of NeuWrite, a national network of science-writing groups that fosters ongoing collaboration between scientists, writers, and artists.