San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Mahmood cuts ‘neuroscientist’ from site
San Francisco entrepreneur Bilal Mahmood, who is running to unseat Supervisor Dean Preston, has removed language describing himself as a neuroscientist from his campaign website after academics in the field questioned his credentials, but he insisted Friday the description is accurate.
The wording had appeared prominently in his campaign literature. On his website, he touted professional experience as a former Obama staffer, a neuroscientist and business owner.
As recently as Feb. 25, Mahmood had introduced himself on his website as “a trained neuroscientist from Stanford” University. That language is no longer on the site, though it states that he conducted neuroscience research at Stanford.
Mahmood confirmed Friday that he removed the language so that it would not distract from campaign issues, called the criticism a smear by opponents, and did not back down from describing himself as a neuroscientist.
The scientists’ questioning of Mahmood’s description of his occupation and the removal of language from his site was first reported by SFist.
The election showdown between Mahmood and Preston is likely to be one of the most heated and politically consequential races of the year and has become a proxy fight between the city’s moderates, who back Mahmood, and Preston, their frequent bogeyman. Preston is also facing another challenger, Autumn Looijen, a key figure in the successful 2022 recall campaign against three members of the San Francisco Unified School District board.
In March, Mahmood won a seat on the Democratic County Central Committee, a powerful but littleknown group that doles out coveted party endorsements during election years.
When he announced his first campaign ads for the DCCC, Mahmood again called himself a neuroscientist.
“As a neuroscientist, business owner, and community leader, I have a track record of getting results,” he said in a Jan. 16 tweet highlighting his first campaign video.
A group of neuroscientists questioned Mahmood’s use of the label in a March 1 letter to the candidate that the Chronicle obtained. In the letter, the group requested additional details about his training and credentials as a neuroscientist, and gave him a week to respond.
“We found it exciting that a neuroscientist was running for office,” the letter stated. “However, upon looking into this claim, we could find little evidence to support it.”
The letter noted that Mahmood’s undergraduate research was on “scarless wound-healing,” and that while career neuroscientists often pursue extended graduate training in neuroscience, psychology, biology or other related fields, Mahmood’s postgraduate studies at Cambridge University focused on the intersection of business and biology.
Max Turner, a signatory of the letter and an assistant professor of biology at State University of New York at Albany who conducted research at Stanford, said he and his colleagues did not intend to be “gatekeepers,” but grew concerned seeing Mahmood’s claims.
“We’re not the arbiters of who is or isn’t a neuroscientist,” he said. “But when someone is in a public role, making claims publicly that they’re more qualified than they are, it’s dishonest.”
“I was in my school newspaper in high school, but I don’t call myself a journalist today,” he continued.
Mahmood had not responded to the scientists as of Friday, Turner said.
Mahmood said the criticism was unfounded and part of a “smear” of his credentials by “opponents without any facts or basis.”
“Dean does not want to talk about the issues or his record,” he said, “he wants to distract as much as possible. He’s done that every time he’s run.”
He provided a copy of a letter written by Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky, his former adviser, who said Mahmood “was an undergraduate-trained neuroscientist.”
“Bilal was an accomplished biology major who specialized in neurobiology in turn, and over the course of his time at Stanford, studied cellular neuroscience, human behavioral biology, stem cell engineering, developmental biology and signal transduction, while excelling in all of them,” Sapolsky wrote. “He also found the time to do two years of research concerning stem cell biology, an emerging area at the time with tremendous medical potential.”
The Chronicle has removed references to Mahmood being a neuroscientist from three previously published stories. Before his candidacy, Mahmood wrote several commentaries on San Francisco government policy and bureaucracy for the opinion pages of the Chronicle; he did not identify himself as a neuroscientist in those pieces. Mahmood ran unsuccessfully for state Assembly in 2022. He announced this year that he would run to unseat Preston, as well as run for a seat on the DCCC, and used the no-limits campaign fundraising rules for the DCCC to amass the largest war chest of any candidate this year. He raised about $257,000 for his successful DCCC race, spending about $210,000 of that, and has so far received about $100,000 for his supervisor campaign.
Mahmood can’t use the money he raised for his DCCC seat on his supervisorial campaign, which has more strict fundraising rules that limit contributions to $500.
Preston said in a statement Friday that “these neuroscientists did a service by speaking out about this and making sure that voters have accurate information.” “It’s important to focus on the actual records of people running for office,” Preston said.