From Big Brother to Berkeley Posted on March 19, 2007 The career path of Stephen Hinshaw (bio) began with volunteer work in prisons and mental health agencies.

So how did I get started in this journey that led me to here at Berkeley? And not to be too long-winded, but I got a real start as an undergraduate deciding whether to go the pre-med route or to keep doing the volunteer work I was doing in the prisons and mental health centers, as a Big Brother. And realized that psychology would be a good way to blend some of the biomedical interests with the people interests and real interests in children and adolescents and helping them.

The next career route after college was to work in the field for three years before applying to graduate school. I had done tutoring, I had worked at a summer camp, I became the coordinator and the director of a residential camp. I helped at a mental health center in Boston, Massachusetts. Started a little school program for kids who'd been tossed out of the public schools and got community research experience. Which led me to really seek a graduate program in clinical psychology. Went to UCLA where I would get developmental and community and statistics and psychopharmacology to put together environments, biology, statistics to do studies of what causes mental illnesses in children and how do we treat them.

And even then in graduate school, I think after the fact it seems as though, well, pretty straight and narrow. Just by chance I started to work with researchers who were studying what was then called hyperactivity. Before ADD was even a term in the nomenclature. Did work in quantitative models, did work in psychopharmacology and in psychotherapy to learn how to combine behavioral, family approaches with medications and the bug hit me then and it took a lot of work to learn the skills, to do a post-doc. Then after a post-doc to be an assistant professor, get the grants to be able to do the work I wanted to do.

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