Untangling Hair Bias in Brain Science
Updated: 5 days ago
Brain Science studies not accounting for Black women's hair
Many neuroscience and health technologies have historically excluded Black women, often because of hair texture, protective styles, or biased research practices. Many widely used techniques—such as EEG, fNIRS, and other scalp-based measures—rely on direct contact with the scalp. But these tools were designed for loose, thin textures. These assumptions create unintended barriers for participants with thick, tightly coiled or protective hairstyles, leading to their underrepresentation in research samples. These tests are critical when seeking epilepsy diagnosis, ADHD assessments, cognitive aging and dementia or brain injury and concussion evaluation. Unfortunately, may clinical studies that can give us critical insights in these areas exclude Black women entirely — not because we aren’t interested, but because the technology isn’t built for us.
And that’s not just an inconvenience. When the technology doesn’t work for us, we can be left out of the research entirely. That means fewer Black women represented in the science shaping how we understand mental health, brain health, aging, and disease.
So, what should we be doing about this?
In this episode, we dig into how common neuroscience and psychophysiological research methods — especially those requiring access to a participant’s hair and scalp like EEG and hair cortisol sampling — can unintentionally exclude people with diverse hair types and cultural hairstyles. Join us as we talk with Dr. Courtney Louis, a Harvard University clinical and research postdoctoral fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Ammon-Pinizzotto Center for Women’s Mental Health. She earned her Ph.D. in clinical science with a specialization in women and gender studies at Michigan State University. Her research focuses on illuminating relationships between anxiety/depression, gonadal hormones, cognitive function, and physiological processes, to inform mental health treatment targets in female populations. Dr. Louis is dedicated to bridging psychology, medicine, and community partnerships to enhance health outcomes and research practices, with a special focus on advancing equitable, community-partnered research that addresses health disparities across the adult lifespan. She has secured several lines of funding to support her research from the National Institute of Mental Health and Harvard Medical School Kaplen Fellowship on Depression.
More Works by Dr. Louis:
To learn more about Dr. Louis, click here.
This episode will be available September 14.
Season 3 Episode 12
Running Time: 27 minutes
