Known for:

Excellent teaching (she’s received five different teaching awards). Wearing many hats: Student Affairs director, advisory dean, teacher, practicing psychiatrist.

Why teach?

The excitement of being around idealistic young people who are eager to learn. I also have a mission, as an educator in psychiatry, to combat the ongoing problem of stigmatization that both the field and mental illness have. It’s one of my core missions to help students understand the nature of the suffering that goes along with mental illness, and to do whatever I can to de-stigmatize the field.

Why psychiatry?

I’ve been fascinated with psychiatric illnesses since college, with the way the brain works and the way symptoms of brain dysfunction can disrupt people’s lives. But it was very difficult to go into it. In fact, I did a year of internal medicine training because I received so much pressure not to go into psychiatry—people would say, “It’s a waste of your talent, don’t you want to be a real doctor?” But it fit my goals—my intellectual interests, my desire to have a positive impact in the lives of people who are very marginalized in our society and who are doing a lot of suffering. Working in a field where I get to know my patients intensely affords me a great opportunity to do that.

What she tells students interested in psychiatry

In the past the science of psychiatry has lagged behind the science of other parts of medicine, because the brain is a difficult organ to study as compared to other parts of the body. But the field of neuroscience is just exploding right now—we finally have some technology that can offer us better insights into what’s going on in the brain. So I tell students I frankly think it’s the most exciting place in medicine to be right now. We’re not in the fine-tuning stage—we are still making fundamental scientific discoveries about how the brain works and interacts with the rest of the body. There are big discoveries yet to be made.

On finding the path that’s right for you

I think that in terms of true, long-term career satisfaction, it is important to maintain a sense of what your own needs and personal goals are, and then to look for opportunities and career paths that are truly consistent with those. I think a lot of students come in thinking they want to be "a something" without necessarily considering whether it’s compatible with their own personal goals for their life, and that can result in disillusionment and burnout. There are so many wonderful opportunities for what you can do with a medical degree—you can do research, teaching, or clinical care, you can be a managed care administrator, you can develop health care delivery systems, you can develop health policy, you can work in international organizations. There are more options than ever before. And the first step to choosing the right one is to assess your own goals.