Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid the foundation for her life’s work.
Today, Totman is a physician specializing in brain injury medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where she treats adults with head trauma, stroke, brain tumors, and more.
She is also the founder of Synapse, a nonprofit focused on providing support for such individuals. The organization grew out of a group she started with Jaclyn Konopka ’14 during medical school at Stanford, and Totman launched it as a national service organization in 2016, while pursuing her master’s degree in public health at Harvard.
There are now chapters at 28 universities across the country—and Totman still runs the organization. “There’s a big need for more resources like this,” she says.
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