[I’ll] tell you a little bit about my career path, which began as an undergraduate as Harvard, where I became interested in the big questions about brain and behavior, neuroscience as well as psychiatry. I came to Stanford Medical School really thinking – not really sure what I wanted to do, thinking about perhaps becoming an academic psychiatrist because I had worked with some academic psychiatrists as an undergraduate in college, but I wasn’t really quite sure.

And very quickly, after my first three months in medical school, I realized going to medical school fulltime was not something I wanted to do, so I started exploring, working in various labs because I had a basic science bent. I wanted to understand how neural activity mediated behavior and neurocircuit function. I ended up working in a lab of a neurologist and his associate, a guy named Steve Waxman and Jeff Kocsis, learning how to do cellular electrophysiology.

And I loved it. I just had a knack for it. I started out in the lab just wanting to check it out, and before I knew it, things were going pretty well. I decided to see if I could get a PhD in neuroscience while I was going through medical school, and was able to do that at Stanford. So I basically did a M.D. PhD at Stanford in cellular neurobiology.

At the same time, in my spare time, I was doing a little bit of clinical research in schizophrenia because I had a side interest in clinical aspects of psychiatry. And then, like many people in that situation, I was faced with the decision of, “Do I do a residency, do I just go do a straight scientific post doc and not to the clinical residency?” And for a variety of reasons, I chose to do a psychiatry residency. And here’s where my path may be a little different than many others who have taken this route.

So what I did is I knew I didn’t want to stay away from my research for too long. I was very concerned about spending four years or three and a half years in a residency with no base – having no touch with basic science research. One, I just enjoyed it so much and wanted to really do it and I wanted to keep my hand in it. So I did an internship, then I took a two-year leave of absence from the psychiatry residency at Stanford and I did a fulltime basic science post doc.