Women in academic psychiatry

Sophia Frangou
Editor

Women in
Academic Psychiatry

A Mind to Succeed

123


Women in Academic Psychiatry


Sophia Frangou
Editor

Women in Academic
Psychiatry
A Mind to Succeed

123


Editor
Sophia Frangou
Department of Psychiatry
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
New York, NY
USA

ISBN 978-3-319-32175-2
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32177-6

ISBN 978-3-319-32177-6

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016944473
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Preface

Barely a day goes by without a news or an academic article about the status of
women in science and medicine. They paint a remarkably consistent picture of

gender inequality that seems to transcend national and institutional boundaries. No
matter what measure is used, from salaries to promotion [1], to grant funding [2, 3],
and to academic publishing [4]; women fare worse than similarly qualified men.
Not surprisingly, they are more likely to leave research and academic life.
Although there has been progress, the gender gap stubbornly refuses to go away.
The issue of the “vanishing women” is perhaps most acute in academic psychiatry. This is because for more than two decades, psychiatry has been among the
medical specialties with the highest proportion of women entering residency programs [5]. The percentage of women in junior academic positions in psychiatry is
also high and consistently higher than that of men. However, the number of women
in positions of leadership remains disproportionally low. In the USA, for example,
only 13 % of department chairs in psychiatry are women [1].
My personal journey from medical school graduate of the University of Athens
to trainee psychiatrist at the world-famous Maudsley Hospital and to senior faculty,
first at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and now at the Icahn
School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has provided the impetus for this book. It has
been a journey full of amazing encounters. I have had the privilege of meeting
many extremely accomplished women, true trail blazers, both as scientists,
clinicians and role models. I have also had the responsibility of helping younger
women navigate their own voyage through the stormy waters of academia as a
program director for academic trainees for over a decade and as a mentor to my
graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty.
The book reflects the duality of my experiences. The first part “They Did It Their
Way” starts with profiling 15 women that hold positions of leadership within
academic psychiatry. They have been very brave in their willingness to provide
intimately personal, very honest, and extraordinarily moving accounts of their own
journeys. Their stories are not just accounts of professional success. They are
powerful tales of self-determination and empowerment. A striking feature they all
share is their desire to pursue their dreams and remain true to their selves and their

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Preface

generosity in opening up their lives to women everywhere. There is of course no
single pathway to academic success but reading these stories can help distill useful
lessons. The second part of the book therefore aims to signpost the “snakes” and to
highlight the “ladders” of the academic world. Very few are gender specific in
themselves but they affect women disproportionally and they prevent the gender
gap from closing. I hope that the messages conveyed in these chapters will provide
opportunities for self-reflection and inspiration for future action.
Some may argue that writing a book such as this implies that the problem with
the gender gap is women themselves. This was exactly what I was told early on in
my career. A senior female colleague advised me to stay away from any womencentered initiative because these were only for women that were not “good enough”
to make it on scientific merit alone. This was and is bad advice and a key example
of how some women internalize and propagate negative societal attitudes about
ourselves. Others may also argue that in order to close the gender gap we need to
focus on societal and institutional barriers. This is of course true but meaningful
change can only happen through the coordinated activity of a critical mass of
likeminded people, women and men.
This is why this book is not just for women. It is also for those men who, either
as partners, fathers, brothers, mentors, or leaders, are interested in understanding the
female perspective on the gender gap and are motivated to strategize change. I have
met many men who declared that they had no idea about the problems and barriers
women faced. Initially I tended not to believe them as these problems were both
tangible and obvious to me. However, I now think otherwise. Male myopia when it
comes to the gender gap is real and needs to be addressed if we are to transform our
working environment.
The hope with “Women in Academic Psychiatry: A Mind to Succeed” is that it

will show to all readers, women or men, that change is possible. There are many
more women than those contributing to this book that are engaged in this process of
change. Success in closing the gender gap is a group process that also critically
depends on individual efforts and achievement. Although this book is focused on
psychiatry, it contributes to a wider societal effort to understand what underpins
discourse on gender equality in leadership.
New York, NY, USA

Sophia Frangou

References
1. American Association of Medical Colleges. The state of women in academic
medicine, the pipeline and pathways to leadership. 2014. />newsroom/aamcstat/,a=418758.
2. Rockey S. Women in biomedical research. 2014. />2014/08/08/women-in-biomedical-research/.


Preface

vii

3. European Research Council. Gender statistics. 2014. />default/files/document/file/Gender_statistics_April_2014.pdf.
4. Filardo G, da Graca B, Sass DM, Pollock BD, Smith EB, Martinez MA. Trends
and comparisons of female first authorship in high impact medical journals:
observational study (1994–2014). BMJ. 2016;352:i847.
5. American Association of Medical Colleges. Report on residents. 2015. https://
www.aamc.org/data/448474/residentsreport.html.


Contents

Part I

They Did It Their Way

1

Lynn E. DeLisi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

3

2

Judith M. Ford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

3

Ellen Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

17

4

Sheila Hollins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

23

5

Hilleke Hulshoff Pol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

31

6

Eve C. Johnstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

37

7

Shaila Misri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

47

8

Antonia New . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

55

9

Mani Pavuluri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

63

10 Mary Phillips . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

11 Natalie Rasgon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

75

12 Marcella Rietschel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

79

13 Nina Schooler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

87

14 Patricia Suppes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

93

15 Carol A Tamminga . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

99

16 Danuta Wasserman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Part II

Plan Your Way

17 The Pursuit of Happiness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
18 External Barriers: Societal Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
19 Internal Barriers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

20 Putting Yourself First . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

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Contents

21 Putting Yourself Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
22 Project Confidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
23 Be Visible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
24 Be Memorable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
25 Be Connected . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
26 Be Persistent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157


Contributors

Lynn E. DeLisi VA Boston Healthcare System, Department of Psychiatry,
Harvard Medical School, Brockton, MA, USA
Judith M. Ford Department of Psychiatry, San Francisco VA Medical Center,
University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA
Sophia Frangou Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount
Sinai, New York, NY, USA
Ellen Frank Department of Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic,
Pittsburgh, USA
Sheila Hollins St. George’s University of London, London, UK
Hilleke Hulshoff Pol Division of Neuroscience, Department of Psychiatry,

University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Eve C. Johnstone Royal Edinburgh Hospital, University Department of Psychiatry, Scotland, UK
Shaila Misri Department of Psychiatry, Obstetrics, Gynecology, University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada; Department of Reproductive Mental
Health Program, BC Children’s & Women’s Hospital, Vancouver, BC, Canada
Antonia S. New Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA
Mani Pavuluri Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago,
Chicago, IL, USA
Mary L. Phillips Department Psychiatry, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Natalie L. Rasgon Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, CA, USA
Marcella Rietschel Department of Genetic Epidemiology in Psychiatry, Central
Institute of Mental Health, Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Nina R. Schooler SUNY Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA

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Contributors

Trisha Suppes Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
University, Palo Alto, CA, USA
Carol A. Tamminga Translational Neuroscience Division in Schizophrenia, UT
Southwestern Medical Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School,
Dallas, TX, USA
Danuta Wasserman Head of the National Centre for Suicide Research and
Prevention of Mental Ill-Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Part I

They Did It Their Way


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Lynn E. DeLisi
Lynn E. DeLisi

1.1

Dr. Lynn E. DeLisi, M.D.

L.E. DeLisi (&)
VA Boston Healthcare System, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School,
940 Belmont Street, Building 2, Brockton, MA 02301, USA
e-mail:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
S. Frangou (ed.), Women in Academic Psychiatry,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32177-6_1

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L.E. DeLisi

Dr. Lynn E. DeLisi, M.D. is an Attending Psychiatrist at VA Boston Healthcare
System and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Massachusetts,
USA. She has been at the vanguard of schizophrenia research throughout her career,
most notably in her use of neuroimaging and genetics to investigate the longitudinal
biological outcomes of schizophrenia. She currently serves on the advisory committee of the Schizophrenia International Research Society, is President-elect, and
is a founding editor of one of the society’s journals, Schizophrenia Research, which
is the largest scientific journal reporting findings exclusively in the field of
schizophrenia research. She has authored a best-selling book entitled “100 Questions and Answers about Schizophrenia: Painful Minds,” which provides practical
answers to patients with schizophrenia and their families.

1.2

What Was Your Earliest Ambition?

Curiously, although this is certainly a common vocabulary word, my first task in
writing this essay was to “Google” the word “ambition,” just to make sure I was
thinking about it correctly. Ambition is “an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, such as by power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to
strive for its attainment.” Quite possibly my earliest glimmer of ambition came with
my first encounter at age 8 with the mortality of a close family member, my grandfather. At age 8, one really cannot fathom what it is like to be dead, but my earliest
memory is telling myself that I must leave a “mark” on the earth before I go so that I
will be remembered forever. The death of my grandfather was the beginning of my
quest for immortality and a significant earliest turning point in my life. It was only a
few years later when I read a child’s version of the biography of Marie Curie that I
knew that I wanted to be a scientist. My father would take me to the town library each
week to borrow books that I devoured easily at a rate of one a day. I read every
biography of all kinds of famous people I could find on the shelves. Marie Curie was
by far my most revered idol and her biography was the most important and treasured
one that I read. What I learned from her life is that despite poverty, hardship, and
prejudice against women in the workplace, perseverance and persistence were the

traits that led to success. I also learned the obvious, that marriage to a scientist with
whom one could uncover the truths of science, was the only way to go.

1.3

What Attracted You to Psychiatry?

It must have been in my sophomore year of high school that my biology teacher showed
us a movie all about cancer and the researchers in white coats pursuing its cause. There
was a boy in my class at the time that I had an intense crush on and he too wanted to be a
cancer researcher; thus, we would spend hours on the phone not only checking homework answers, but dreaming together about how we would solve the riddle of cancer.


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Lynn E. DeLisi

5

That led me to medical school, which was the first step certainly that would lead me to
psychiatry. My goals upon entering medical school were to go into research through
internal medicine, endocrinology, or neurology. So how did I happen to choose psychiatry? It is quite embarrassing to say, but at the time, I had two infant children, as well
as a need to do a residency. My husband was quite old-fashioned and believed the
changing of diapers was up to women, and thus, I had no choice but to look for a
residency in a specialty that had the least amount of night-call. To be honest, that was
how I was led to psychiatry. At the time of my residency, however, departments of
psychiatry were all run by psychoanalysts and biology generally became buried by my
preceptors’ devotion to Freudian principles. My rebellious nature then led to many
arguments in classes in which I would insist that biology underlies all of human
behavior. I particularly fought the suggestion my child psychiatry teacher endorsed that

full-time mothering during the very early years was necessary for all children in order to
avoid later psychopathology. Later on in the program when decisions had to be made
about where to go upon graduation, I was awarded the chance to be a clinical associate
(postdoctoral trainee) at The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). See below as
to how I managed to get in through “the back door” without putting in a formal application. Since I was very proud of this opportunity, it was with much dismay that I took to
heart the interpretation by the director of my residency that I was surely exhibiting
“countertransference to my patients” by choosing to do a fellowship in biological
psychiatry in the NIMH intramural program rather than going to one of the schools for
training in psychoanalysis. The year was 1978.
In summary, my choice of psychiatry was one of convenience due to the
pressures of motherhood and marriage in the 1970s, a time when women’s liberation had only just begun. Once in the field, however, I became fascinated particularly with the symptoms of schizophrenia, having read and viewed the movie “I
Never Promised you a Rose Garden” and read many of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s
volumes on the psychoanalysis of her patients with schizophrenia—an illness to
which I devoted my biological pursuits in years to come.

1.4

What Do You Enjoy Most in Your Job Now?

It has now been 40 years since I began my residency in psychiatry. I had high hopes
for my career and saw myself as someone who was going to, and must, rise to the
top, even despite the “glass ceiling” that was always placed directly above my head
as a woman. I envisioned myself simply solving the enigma of schizophrenia,
perhaps even awarded the Nobel Prize or at least the “Nobel” of schizophrenia
research. That never happened and so in that, and many other ways, I have considered myself a failure. I failed at negotiation for top positions and often considered family ahead of profession in choosing the paths I took. The few times I
chose to follow my career aspirations before other considerations, the choices led to
the eventual dissolution of my marriage and to personal hardship. The job I currently have is one in which I accepted in order to be close geographically to my


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L.E. DeLisi

family. It was not and is not a position of leadership, nor one that gives me a broad
impact on the alleviation of mental illness that I would have liked; nor is it one that
allows me to think about science, develop hypotheses, and pursue them with scientific rigor. I have a heavy load of patients mainly with very acute and
life-threatening mental illness. What I do like about this current job is that I am
helping my patients each day to recover from debilitating symptoms and to be able
to go back to life to pursue their dreams. It gives me great satisfaction to see them
improve as a result of my care. I also enjoy being able to teach a new generation of
young psychiatrists, such as the excited and eager residents who rotate through our
program. Perhaps by being a role model for them, I will influence their careers and
have a lasting effect on their life choices and goals. These will certainly outlive me
and in that sense I will have achieved the immortality that I pined for as an 8 year
old.

1.5

Who Do You Consider Your Mentor(S) During
Your Career?

My first real mentor, and one who influenced my life in so many ways, was
Richard J. Wyatt. When I first met Richard, he was giving incredibly inspiring
psychopharmacology lectures to my residency class, although he ran a large, successful research laboratory in the intramural program of NIMH at St Elizabeth’s
Hospital in Washington, DC. He was a very dynamic and energetic teacher, and so
it was no surprise that I would get up enough bravery to make an appointment to
see him for career advice during my 2nd year of residency. Much of the details of
that meeting 39 years ago are still very clear in my memory. He cautioned me about
becoming a researcher and even applying for the coveted NIMH Clinical Associate
Fellowship for those first years beyond my residency. “You would never get in,” he

said. “You are a woman with 2 young kids and no one would believe you could do
it…Research requires long hours of devotion to succeed…No,” he said. “You can’t
possibly do it.” I remember going home crying that night, but also vowing to
persist. I went back to him again and again, and finally, during my last year of
residency, he found discretionary funds to bring me in as the first woman clinical
research fellow in his laboratory. What I did not realize was that it would take 2
more years of my working hard and succeeding to uncover something important to
have him take me seriously and smile with amazement at me, saying that I “had
surpassed the men in the laboratory.” Eventually, I went on to work at other NIMH
laboratories, although from time to time Richard kept up with me and continued to
advise me in career decisions until his untimely death in the early 2000s. Dan
Weinberger and I organized a festschrift in his honor the year before he died. In the
process, I sent personal invitations to all the mentees he guided, surprisingly finding
that they numbered over 100. This too made me reflect on how much
Richard J. Wyatt achieved immortality by living on in every one of us and our
mentees as well.


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Lynn E. DeLisi

7

My mentors that followed were Monte Buchsbaum, Elliot Gershon, and Fritz
Henn. Notably, there were no women who mentored me, which was quite significant, as I was alone in trying to find and fight my way through many obstacles
placed in front of me in what was, particularly in my early years, “a man’s world.”
Marie Curie continued to be a mentor of sorts in that her career and life served as
the only role model I saw myself following.
While I did not have female mentors per se, I did have somewhat older women

colleagues I could look up to and want to emanate in some ways. Nancy Andreasen
was a strong force in my career always giving me critical advice and spurring me on
to do better. Paula Clayton exemplified the woman leader that I wished I could be
and so I was so outraged many years ago that I wrote a protest letter to the Board of
Biological Psychiatry when she was president because one of the men introduced
her by saying “what I like about Paula is her new hairdo.” Part of me also wanted to
be like Myrna Weissman, who too was a leader in our field who has accomplished
so much. There were, however, other women in the course of my career, who
particularly attempted to block my success, with a curious bias against my grants,
award nominations, and anything that brought me personal success. Sometimes, I
found that some women colleagues facilitated my career, while others hindered it
and could be my worst enemies of all.

1.6

What Was Your Best Career Move?

This is a difficult question to answer because as I look back on the moves I made from
the NIMH-IRP, to SUNY Stony Brook, to NYU, and then to the Boston VA, each
were made with other considerations in play rather than advancement of my career.
However, if a move could be considered some projects with which I achieved success,
it was first, with my development and establishment of the journal Schizophrenia
Research and of the two societies I worked so hard to develop and administer: The
International Society of Psychiatric Genetics and The Schizophrenia International
Research Society. The field of biological psychiatry goes on now for the better with
each of these 3 things in place for which I have enormous pride.

1.7

What Were the Key Obstacles You Had to Overcome?

The obstacles I overcame have become the story of my professional life and career.
All of them I see being related to my being a woman and thus a wife and mother as
well. When I applied for medical school, I was asked whether I planned on marriage
and I was advised by the male professor who interviewed me to “make sure I used
birth control.” Another interviewer at a different school asked me which I would put
first: my career or my husband and family, to which I replied it would be the latter.
I was rejected from that school soon after the interview.


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L.E. DeLisi

When my husband took a postdoc at a major university in Connecticut and I was
in medical school in Philadelphia, I was forced to drop out for a year, but overcame
this obstacle by negotiating a special arrangement with my understanding female
Dean to finish medical school at my husband’s postdoctoral institution. But then
when my husband obtained his first job in a remote region of northern New Mexico
where I had no opportunity to complete a residency, I managed to pass examinations to obtain a medical licence in New Mexico and to perform general practice in
rural clinics until the time we moved a few years later to an urban area with lots of
opportunities. My writings above about how I became “interested” in psychiatry tell
of other obstacles I had to overcome in my personal life. But perhaps the most
memorable obstacle to achieving advancement and success in my career came when
I was a fellow in the intramural program and was asked to leave, not because I had
not accomplished some important things, but simply because I was not part of the
“all boys network” that existed at the time. This obstacle was not overcome by me
personally, but rather by someone else, a woman in my same situation, who filed a
class action suit against the institution for sexual discrimination. While this suit was
active and she was calling in witnesses, naming me in writing as another colleague

who clearly was discriminated against, I was called to a special meeting of the
director. I was told the details of the lawsuit and how it was not in my best interest
to support it and in turn was given the option “because of my outstanding work” to
become a permanent senior member of the NIMH-IRP and to become a member of
any of the existing laboratories I wished. That certainly was an opportunity I could
not turn down. When I finally did leave NIMH in 1987, I did this by my own
choice.

1.8

What Kept You Going During Difficult Times?

I have had many difficult times. Research that did not go as planned, despite months
of gathering data, grants written well that never got funded, failures in my personal
life, and failures obtaining advanced positions and achieving awards and prizes for
my work. What has kept me going most of all is persistence, focus on goals with
energy and hard work, and a desire to achieve that outweighs all the failures
combined.

1.9

What Role (Positive and/or Negative) Did Being
a Woman Play in Your Career?

Being a woman meant invariably that I was noticed more. I stood out at meetings
because of my minority status and so that made me more visible, particularly if I did
well. Women also, and I think this includes me, are more collegial and willing to
share data and ideas with others than men. I have also been more sensitive to issues

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Lynn E. DeLisi

9

specific to women and have fought hard for others if I thought they were being
discriminated against because they were female. I have had, on the other hand,
mentioned above, many obstacles that did have a negative effect on me because
I am a woman. These are just facts that I live with. Currently being an “older
woman” is no fun. Postmenopausal women are seen as “over-the-hill,” whereas
similar aged men give the appearance of being more distinguished and endowed
with leadership qualities that people often do not think of women as having.

1.10

How Did You Deal With the Issue
of Work–Family Balance?

Much of this question is answered above when I wrote of the obstacles and other
personal challenges in my life. However, while achieving a successful work–family
balance was a challenge, I did manage it by obtaining special permission to take
longer to graduate medical school, to do residency 3/4 time (yet finishing on time
by sacrificing lunch and working twice as hard as the others in the time I had), by
accepting positions in my career that were convenient for my family, by having
homes in two different states or halfway between my husband’s office and my own,
but most of all, by spending my money on full-time housekeepers, and by analyzing
data in hours way after all others in my household had gone to sleep. I am a
grandmother now and see these same issues being dealt with by my daughter and
daughter-in-law, each very differently. The latter sacrificed her own career for my

son’s and so she stays home and manages the children and all their activities. My
daughter struggles with a full-time career, but manages because her husband
changed diapers, drives kids to endless activities, and has done his share of the
family chores. How one balances career and family is the essence and challenge of
life and it differs by stage of life for sure.

1.11

What Would You do Differently If You Were
to Start Your Career Now?

This is a question that can only have a theoretical answer, as times have changed
and the challenges and obstacles in my 40-year career would not be the same if
I now had the opportunity for another 40. However, there are things I could have
done differently: (1) I could have devoted myself more to raising my children in
those crucial years when they needed me and were growing up. Those years did not
last very long, but those were the years that I was climbing the academic ladder and
because of that always so stressed by the need to succeed. (2) I would have had
more confidence in myself so that I would have been able to develop a strategy for
negotiating for what I deserved as I advanced. Perhaps formal training in leadership
and negotiation skills would be something I should have pursued. (3) I never would


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have taken a job that was a parallel or even worse, a step-down move. And
(4) despite my focus on a full-time research career in my early and middle years,
I should have foreseen the power of being board certified in my specialty and

pursued “Boards” despite my feeling that they were a waste of time. At the moment
when I finally realized this, it was too late, as all my close colleagues were board
examiners and they had too much difficulty finding anyone to interview me for the
orals who did not know me.

1.12

What Advice Would You Give to a Young Woman
Starting Her Career Now?

Always strive for excellence, be persistent, work hard, and be the best you can.
Never take advantage of your status as a woman to expect special favors or privileges. Know that you are equal to men, but also different in many ways. These
differences can either help or hinder you, depending on how you use them. Most of
all, remember to be compromising and sharing with both your male and female
colleagues, negotiating with kindness and respect for them, as you would like them
to do with you.


2

Judith M. Ford
Judith M. Ford

2.1

Dr. Judith M. Ford

Dr. Judith M. Ford is a Professor of Psychiatry and Co-director of the Brain
Imaging and EEG Laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, USA.
She is at the forefront of efforts to bridge the gap between neuroscience and

J.M. Ford (&)
Department of Psychiatry, San Francisco VA Medical Center, University of California San
Francisco, 4150 Clement Street, 116D, San Francisco, CA 94121, USA
e-mail:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
S. Frangou (ed.), Women in Academic Psychiatry,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32177-6_2

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J.M. Ford

psychiatry. Her research focuses on integrating data across imaging modalities and
EEG to characterize the neural correlates of symptom expression in psychosis. Dr.
Ford is committed to promoting mentoring in her field and in particular to fostering
the next generation of translational psychiatrists through her role as Director of the
VA Schizophrenia Research Fellowship Program.

2.2

What Was Your Earliest Ambition?

I had a series of early ambitions. As a tall 4 year old, I dreamed of being the tall
lady in the circus. Several years later, I dreamed of being a movie star—not an
actress—just a star. In high school, I was the first girl ever to run for student council
president and dismissed questions of whether it was “against the rules” for a girl to
run. I failed at all three dreams. When I got to college, there were not many women

role models on the faculty, and instead of dreaming of being a college professor, I
dreamed of marrying one. I succeeded at that, but only after I became a professor
myself.

2.3

What Attracted You to Psychiatry?

During my first (and only) year in the PhD program in cognitive psychology at UC
Berkeley in 1970, I studied human memory. Historical scholars may remember that
UC Berkeley closed its doors in the spring of 1970 following the invasion of
Cambodia. This was a time of great political and social upheaval and, for many, a
time of personal introspection. I decided to “take a break” from memory research to
find a socially responsible job. My quest led me to the laboratory of Dr. Bert Kopell
of the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford Medical School, located at the VA
hospital. Dr. Kopell was studying schizophrenia, using methods at the “interface of
psychology and physiology.” Not only did the prospect of learning about psychiatric illnesses seem ecologically valid, but I was also intrigued by the possibility of
learning how to record evoked potentials—a “window on the brain.” Although I
was surrounded by veterans with schizophrenia, initially I was not particularly
interested in their symptoms or illness and focused instead on basic human neuroscience. A product of the sixties, I believed schizophrenia was a “choice,” not a
brain disease, and wondered why my colleagues were wasting their time. In spite of
my biases, in the mid-1980s, I worked on a schizophrenia brain imaging project
with Dolf Pfefferbaum and quickly realized what others already knew: People with
schizophrenia have a serious brain disease, manifested in abnormalities in brain
function and structure. I came to appreciate the power of clinical neuroscience
research in promoting our understanding of the mechanisms of psychopathology
and giving patients and families a biological explanation for the symptoms of the
illness.

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Judith M. Ford

2.4

13

What Do You Enjoy Most in Your Job Now?

I enjoy interacting with patients in our studies and listening to them talk about their
lives and experiences. This is personally rewarding, and it also informs my efforts
to understand the neural mechanisms responsible for the hallucinations and delusions they describe. I enjoy interacting with my colleagues locally, nationally, and
internationally. This happens in the course of running a laboratory full of young
scholars, in serving on and chairing committees and in presenting research data at
conferences around the world.

2.5

Who Do You Consider Your Mentor(s)
During Your Career?

I was an “early adopter” of the EEG-based evoked potential method. Its utility in
human neuroscience led me to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience at Stanford. Although
there was local expertise, there was only one other neuroscience student interested in
human neuroscience, making it a lonely enterprise. Steve Hillyard, at UC San Diego,
was an even earlier adopter of the method, and I was lucky enough to spend a
summer in San Diego working closely with him and all the other graduate students in
his laboratory. It was a rich educational experience that I could not have had at
Stanford. Steve agreed to remotely guide my PhD dissertation on human attention

and evoked potentials. After getting my PhD, I continued to work closely with Tom
Roth and Dolf Pfefferbaum, psychiatrists and human electrophysiologists at Stanford. They were important scientific and career mentors and worked hard to get me
appointed to the psychiatry faculty at a time when PhDs were not exactly welcomed.

2.6

What Was Your Best Career Move?

The best move I ever made was my move to Yale. The Yale Psychiatry Department
valued PhDs and welcomed me. About a month after I arrived, I got a call from the
chair’s office inviting me to the “tenured faculty” meeting. I gasped, “I have tenure?”
Tenure was something I had never dreamed of having nor thought to ask about.

2.7

What Were The Key Obstacles You Had to Overcome?

Before moving to Yale, where the culture welcomed PhDs, the biggest obstacle I
faced was being a PhD in a department full of MDs. PhDs could not get a faculty
appointment without grant support and could not get grant support without a faculty
appointment—an impossible situation. To work around this and stay in the research


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J.M. Ford

game, I had to find colleagues willing to serve as principle investigator on grant
applications I wrote. I did this for decades, until the culture softened and I joined the
faculty. However, even after I was on the faculty and had risen to the rank of full

professor, I continued to face obstacles in the workplace. One Sunday afternoon
before a Monday morning MRI scan of a research participant, an MD in my
department questioned whether I was qualified to do MR scanning because I was
not an MD. He tried hard to shut me down. My department chair came to my rescue
in the nick of time, and I scanned early Monday morning.

2.8

What Kept You Going During Difficult Times?

Occasionally, over my long career, I have wondered whether it is all worth it—
feelings of inadequacy fueled by negative reviews of papers, difficulty balancing
work and family, and internecine warfare in the department. At those times when I
got close to quitting, I realized I would miss all the friends and colleagues I had
gotten to know over the years. Although I only saw them once or twice a year, I had
developed strong attachments to them, because we had “grown up together” in the
field. If I quit, I’d never see them again.

2.9

What Role (Positive and/or Negative) Did Being
a Woman Play in Your Career?

As an older woman, I recently realized that I am “invisible.” My equally old friends
from high school agree—it does not matter what we do, what we wear, what we
say—we go unnoticed. We are all OK with it, and it is strangely liberating.
However, in thinking about when this “invisibility” started, I realize that even
young women are often unheard, or if heard, they are not given credit for what they
have contributed. The universality of this was apparent when I saw a New Yorker
cartoon, depicting a board meeting with the chairman saying, “That’s an excellent

suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.”

2.10

How Did You Deal with the Issue
of Work–Family Balance?

I balanced work and family by working part-time and raising my daughters
full-time—a 150 % FTE. I worked part-time for 22 years, from the birth of my
older daughter until my younger daughter left for college. I worked whenever they
were occupied with friends, lessons, sports, music, school, or asleep. When they
were little, struggles at work could not bring me down because of their pervasive


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Judith M. Ford

15

positive energy and my love for them. When they were in high school, I learned that
I was a role model for them. Although it was terrifying to have such an elevated
position in their lives, it made me glad that I had never given up my career, even
when the work–family balance seemed impossible. Going forward, if I ever thought
of throwing in the towel, I could not because I did not want to let them down.

2.11

What Would You Do Differently if You Were
to Start Your Career Now?

Two words: day care.

2.12

What Advice Would You Give to a Young Woman
Starting her Career Now?

Young women are always advised on how to successfully negotiate with their
department chair, but I think it is just as important for women to figure out how to
negotiate with their husbands for a fair distribution of household and family
responsibilities. Of course, the biological realities of childbirth and infant care can
derail the best-negotiated balance between work and family; it will need to be
renegotiated as soon as it is emotionally and biologically possible.