It Started By Accident Posted on March 19, 2007 The career path of Joel W. Grube (bio) was strongly influenced by serendipity.

Well, my career path is rather interesting. I never intended to come into the study of alcohol and kids, although that's where most of my research is now. As it turned out, when I was in graduate school, I worked for a professor there who did one study on smoking and trying to prevent smoking in kids, and when I went away to my first job, which happened to be in Dublin, Ireland, they decided that I had to be an expert on adolescent drug use because I had been involved in this one study on smoking.

And so they asked me to undertake a major survey, the first major survey in Ireland of drug, alcohol and tobacco use among youth, and so I did that and when I came back to the States a few years later - that would have been about 1984 - I took a post-doctoral position in alcohol studies. And again that was absolutely by accident. I just responded to an ad in the "APA Monitor" because I wanted to live in the Bay Area.

And in some ways I guess you could say it's been downhill from there because I became an alcohol researcher, specializing in alcohol and media for the most part, but alcohol and young people more generally. And gradually branched out into other areas - sexuality, adolescent sexuality - but it all started very, very fortuitously. Just totally by accident.

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