Pria Anand Award-Winning Neurologist, Professor, and Author

Pria Anand is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. She is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Medical School, and she trained in neurology, neuro-infectious diseases, and neuroimmunology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Massachusetts General Hospital. She has received the Thomas J. Preziosi Award for Clinical Excellence in Neurology, the Frank L. Coulson, Jr. Award for Clinical Excellence for “a level of mastery in interpersonal skills, humanism, diagnostic acumen, knowledge, and a scholarly approach to clinical practice”, and the A.B. Baker Award for her teaching.

Dr. Anand practices at Boston University Medical Center, where she cares for hospitalized patients with acute neurological disorders and for patients with neurological complications of infectious diseases, including HIV, neurocysticercosis, meningitis, and encephalitis. She is the Director of the Neurology Residency Program and the Chief of the Division of Hospital Neurology, and her academic work primarily focuses on neuro-infectious diseases and neurologic health equity.

In her forthcoming book, The Mind Electric (out June 10, 2025), Dr. Anand reveals—through case study, history, fable, and memoir—all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story. Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.

Beyond the book, Dr. Anand’s writing has appeared in Time Magazine, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in the Boston area with her family.