Dennis Arruda, a recent Roger Williams University graduate and a Bristol native currently living in Portsmouth, will soon be moving to Texas to pursue a neuroscience doctoral program at the University of Texas at Galveston. It’s a fitting next step for a man of his intellect and tenacity, but the route he took to get to this point was anything but typical.

Arruda grew up in a household where he witnessed both domestic violence and drug addiction, becoming an addict himself in high school. He bounced around from Mt. Hope High School to Portsmouth High School and finally the Met School in Newport. “I barely graduated from high school,” he said.

He was homeless by age 18 and briefly incarcerated at age 20.
“That time in between high school and college was a very interesting learning period for me,” said Arruda.

With the help of a peer support group of former addicts he found his way to sobriety. “At the end of the day, I just couldn't see life continuing with drugs,” he said. “And I couldn't really see life going on without drugs, but I had to go one way or the other.”

With the insight gained from that experience, he thought it would be interesting to study addiction from an academic perspective, in hopes of finding a universally effective treatment. It was at that point Arruda decided to go back to school.

A friend told him that Roger Williams University offered tuition remission to employees after 2 years of service. He found a job with Dining Services, and spent the next two years working full-time at RWU while getting an Associate’s degree at CCRI.

In 2022, Arruda enrolled in four courses at RWU, and was ready to begin the next phase of his academic career when the unimaginable happened. His 9-year old brother Kevin died of a catastrophic brain injury two days after being pulled unresponsive from the water off Easton’s beach in Newport.

Arruda’s grief in the immediate aftermath led him to drop two of his courses that first semester, but thankfully, it didn’t drive him back to old habits — quite the opposite. Struggling to understand why medicine couldn’t fix his brother, he said his grief sparked a desire to understand the process of neurogenesis in the adolescent and injured brain.

He knew he wanted to major in neuroscience, but there was one problem — RWU did not offer that degree.

That didn’t stop Arruda who, with the help of professor Joseph Roberts and his mentor Dr. Victoria Heimer-McGinn, an associate professor of neuroscience, designed his own degree path, combining elements of psychology, biology, and chemistry.

He immersed himself in his studies, and earned a research position in Heimer-McGinn's behavioral neuroscience lab. That led to independent research, including a project Arruda designed to investigate the role of voltage-gated calcium channels in bipolar disorder. He has presented at international conferences and obtained his own research funding from the several agencies including the NIH funded (RI-INBRE) and the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). He was also named a Fulbright finalist to conduct research in Sweden, though he recently found out he was not selected for the grant for this cycle.

Arruda was also active with Brain Waves RI, a non-profit organization that educates the community about neuroscience. “We go to schools and out in the community and have a yearly brain fair,” he said. “We started a Brainwaves club at RWU as well, where I organized the first brainwave RWU fair with the support of Dean Wysor of the School of Social and Natural Sciences.”

When he’s not studying or working, Arruda like to recharge by rock climbing, bouldering, or just getting out and enjoying nature.

He’s looking forward to his August move, to take the next steps and continue to build his expertise in regenerative medicine and neuropsychiatry, with the goal of ultimately contributing to life-saving science.

And he doesn’t have to worry about finding a job to pay for it all — he’s going into a paid PhD program that not only covers his tuition, it provides a stipend to cover living expenses.

Arruda knows his path has been unique, and he views it from a place of strength, knowing that it enables him to ask novel scientific questions and, as he says, “help shape the next generation of disadvantaged overachievers.”

“I was inspired by my neuroscience mentor (Heimer-McGinn) to teach the next generation. If I didn't have her, I don't know where I'd be,” Arruda said. “And and I want to be that person for others.”