According to MIT Technology Review, Alissa Totman ’13 traces her career to a student group she joined as an MIT sophomore: BrainTrust, which pairs undergraduates with people who have 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. She described that experience as 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 offering support for people with brain injuries. The organization grew out of a group she started with Jaclyn Konopka ’14 during medical school at Stanford, and she launched it as a national service organization in 2016 while earning a master’s degree in public health at Harvard.
Synapse now has 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. With a single source, there are no conflicting accounts to compare, and the profile presents her trajectory as a direct line from campus volunteering to national impact.