Q&A: Favour Nerrise has a plan to spot brain disease early with AI

When Favour Nerrise gets up to present her thesis research—on detecting neurodegenerative disease with AI—to a panel of judges at Stanford’s inaugural 3-Minute Thesis competition on April 17, it will be the culmination of conjoined passions for science, engineering, communication, and health equity that have motivated her from a precociously early age. 

When she was five, Nerrise was already giving speeches on behalf of her school—in French and English—to legislators in her home country of Cameroon, in Central Africa. Her love of science earned her the family nickname “Doc" and a place in a prestigious summer science program at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, where she had moved when she was 10. 

In college, Nerrise initially planned on attending medical school to become a brain surgeon, but instead became fascinated by the power of engineering to create impactful new technologies to improve people’s lives. 

Soon after Nerrise began graduate training in electrical engineering at Stanford, a favorite uncle back home passed away after eight painful years struggling with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disorder that often strikes at a relatively young age and attacks fundamental aspects of a person’s personality: the ability to make decisions, to judge right from wrong, to communicate with loved ones, and ultimately to perform self-care. According to Nerrise, her uncle’s decline was especially devastating to witness because he had been an accomplished attorney in Cameroon and the head of a loving household. Her uncle’s death strengthened Nerrise’s resolve to dedicate herself to building technologies to fight against brain disease—and to focus on the disparities in expertise, access, and awareness that make neuroscience research and clinical care so much harder in places like Cameroon. 

Now a fourth-year electrical engineering PhD candidate and fellow in the NeuroTech Training Program at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Nerrise has developed technology, guided by artificial intelligence (AI), that makes it easier to detect early symptoms of neurodegenerative disease before it can currently be diagnosed in the clinic. Her hope is that these early diagnoses will make it possible for patients to receive emerging treatments before it's too late. 

Nerrise has not lost her childhood passion for communication and now will compete for cash prizes in the 3-Minute Thesis competition, an international event hosted by hundreds of universities around the world. She is one of nine finalists in Stanford’s first-ever competition, hosted by the vice provost for graduate education, emceed by president Jonathan Levin, and judged by a panel of Stanford luminaries.

We caught up with Nerrise ahead of the competition to ask about her journey and the impact of her research. The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

RSVP to attend the 3-Minute Thesis Competition on April 17 and vote for your favorite presentation. 

Q&A with Favour Nerrise

Why did you enter the 3-Minute Thesis competition and how do you feel about being a finalist?

I’m absolutely thrilled. What inspired my interest in it is because I'm part of the Stanford EDGE Fellowship and we had sort of a 7-minute version of the 3-minute competition. It's like a 7-minute quick talk about your dissertation or a paper of interest to you. I did that last year, and I really really loved that experience. 

How did you get into this field? Why does your research and research communication matter to you personally?

My interest in the field started when I was pretty young. Growing up, I wanted to be a brain surgeon. Then engineering eventually won, and it’s what I ended up doing in college. But I still maintained a strong interest in the brain and wanted to use technology for neuroscience. My freshman year I got to do research with a lab that collaborated with the FDA—we worked on building a 3D magnetic helmet that could use AI to stimulate motor impairment symptoms in patients in real-time. I was like, “Maybe I can do both! Maybe I can both be a medical doctor and create these tools and do all these crazy things.” 

Back in my home country, when I was 5 years old, I started giving speeches on behalf of the student body to ministers—the equivalent of senators and congresspeople in the U.S. I was doing that between the ages of 5 through 10, which was insane. I would do my little 3- to 5-minute speech in French and in English, and my parents once again let me do all these crazy things. 

What is your research about, and how does it link to Wu Tsai Neuro's mission of advancing the frontiers of neuroscience and its impact on human health and wellbeing?

Working with my advisor, Professor Ehsan Adeli, I’m developing an AI tool that can combine signals and leverage data from multiple devices in the home, including wearables like smart watches, home video cameras, and portable electroencephalography (EEG) headsets, to make early predictions about a person’s risk of developing severe motor impairments related to Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s disease. One major goal is to complement standard—but expensive—procedures such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) scans with more accessible alternatives. 

My goal is to focus on using low-cost, non-invasive technologies that can be found in the home to measure signals like heart rate, gait, and sleep patterns—especially in older adults who are most at risk for a lot of these brain diseases. Then we use AI to help us find patterns between these many different types of signals that maybe a clinician might find harder to do, especially when crunched for time. 

One of the biggest advantages is the capacity for continuous monitoring, which means we have more than just a single timepoint of your data.  Hopefully by the end of my PhD we can have something a little bit more interactive. That's a project that I'm coming up with by the end of this year. 

How has your experience as a member of the Wu Tsai Neuro community influenced your research and graduate school experience?

I'm a Fellow in the Neurotech Graduate Training Program at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and our entire goal is to enable a deeper understanding of these diseases and ways in which we can help clinicians and drug developers and other interventions to be faster, safer, and more effective. To support this, we collaborate often with neurologists and other clinical experts.

Last summer, I had the great pleasure of being a mentor to Eliana Randazzo Ridley through the Neuroscience Undergraduate Research Opportunity—Community College (NeURO–CC) program at the institute. It was a great experience and a unique program because you get to train students from community colleges who have had no experience at all doing scientific research. And the goal as a mentor is in about eight weeks of the summer quarter, you help them better understand and become interested in scientific research and ultimately become scientists or research collaborators themselves.

We did just that with Eliana. We covered how she could improve her data science skills, and how to use AI. I taught her how to code in eight weeks. She had never presented in a lab before, so that was a huge milestone for her. Creating her very first poster was another huge milestone, and it was such a rush to be there the final day and see her at the poster symposium with people coming up to speak with her. I was just like “Oh, my God! This is why I love teaching and mentoring!” So yeah, it was a fantastic experience.

Who has been the biggest source of inspiration for you?

I always have to give a shout-out to my parents, in terms of pursuing this entire field or having the confidence to be where I am now. I definitely did not think I'd ever be an engineer growing up. Even though I guess I was doing it, I just didn't think that was a thing for me. But my parents put me into summer programs, and when I was a 12-year-old, I took a class that had to do with the brain at a program at Johns Hopkins. It was about robotics for neurosurgery. 

My parents had moved here in their thirties. Five years later, I moved to the U.S. when I was 10 years old. My folks had very big dreams about being able to help us—their children— pursue more things. In my home country, they did their best. I had done a lot of big things back home, but they saw that there was just more that I could be. They made that decision to leave me and my little sister behind and start over in a completely new country, and yeah, once we were able to join them here, I mean they went for it. There's not a single program that I told my parents I wanted to do that they did not support. They were so trusting of it. I remember my mom asking me in the car one time, “Do you need to do ALL of this?” I told her, “I have a plan.” She will never let me forget that moment.