Marinating in Research Posted on November 19, 2007 An NIH fellowship prepared Terence A. Ketter (bio) for establishing up a clinic.

The career path of doing a fellowship at the NIH is something a little different from doing a fellowship at a university. In that fellowship experience, you’re basically marinated in a research environment, and so you don’t get the same amount of experience in grant writing, and that’s probably one of the main downsides of going the intramural program. But the upside is that just the degree of exposure to a research environment and the intensity, I think, is something that is probably greater than you would see in a university environment. And after my time at the NIH, I was invited to start a bipolar disorder clinic at Stanford. And I have to say that having worked with Dr. Post all those years prepared me pretty well for that.

Part of the reason I was there so long, besides loving what I was doing, was I got experience not only in psychopharmacology and clinical trials, but also brain imaging. And so coming to Stanford, I set up a bipolar disorders clinic and set up research infrastructure in clinical trials to complement the efforts in the brain imaging. And had the unique experience of being able to start something from the ground up.

And that actually was a very valuable experience, and what ended up evolving was something quite different from what I experienced at the NIH, because this was rather than being an inpatient unit full of treatment resistant rapid cyclers, set up an outpatient program with a wide variety of patients, including students from Stanford referred by the student health center. And so was able to generate a population where we had had some patients that were treatment resistant, very complicated, perhaps as complicated as the patients at the NIH, but ranging all the way through to some people who were having first episodes and were actually quite responsive to treatment.

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