It Started With a Review Article Posted on January 14, 2008 Jeannette R. Ickovics (bio) explains how she found her niche as a social psychologist writing in the field of public health.

My degree is in social psychology, and I started off doing a post doc in a psychology department, moved to a department of medicine, and then to a school of public health, and it’s really here that I think I found my roots. My work as a social psychologist was always more applied. I certainly had a strong basis in theory and methodology, but my interest had a very strong “make a difference” bent and some political, had a lot of interest in having research inform clinical care and health policy.

I say that clearly now, that obviously evolved, but I went to graduate school in Washington, D.C., and spent time on the Hill working for the American Psychological Association as a lobbyist and then also -- as a fellow, but essentially as a lobbyist -- and then also for my state representative both in the 1980s.

So I think that the path is never totally linear; I think it’s important to be opportunistic from time to time. I was very interested in women’s health and had an opportunity early in my post doc to reflect on health issues of relevance to women that had not received much attention before, so I did a review article back in 1989. And it wasn’t many pages, but three paragraphs of it was on HIV and AIDS. And in 1989, there was not much attention to women with HIV; it was in fact not long before that that it was still being called Gay-related immuno-deficiency.

So one important thing for my career was finding a niche. Writing three paragraphs on women and HIV in 1989 and recognizing that very few people had been working in that area, and so I quickly, early in my career, developed expertise in an area where few had tread. And really thinking about, I think, for having been in a psychology department, a department of medicine, and a department of public health, quickly developing an interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary perspective and recognizing how important it is to really recognize the complexities of health.

And not to become expert in all of those areas, but to create that niche by recognizing my expertise as a social psychologist, as a health psychologist and how I could collaborate with those in medicine and public health to create a more comprehensive understanding of the determinants and consequences, in this case, of HIV for women.

« Back to Article