Not Very Streamlined Posted on January 14, 2008 F. Xavier Castellanos (bio) relates the story of his moves from medical school into research and from the NIMH to New York.

Career paths are, I think, as unique as fingerprints in some way, and obviously there are a lot of people who follow fairly straightforward — they were doing research in high school and in college, and it followed a very nice, clean progression. But I find that there are many more cases of approaches that are a bit akin to what I like to think of, I say that I pursued the scenic route to getting here because I went in a number of different directions. No real advanced planning, which is the way it worked out.

Starting in linguistics and just kind of taking that forward far enough to decide not to become a linguist but fascinated by questions that it raised. And then moving into psycholinguistics and kind of accidentally moving into psychopharmacology, and doing that for a while and deciding that this was just too cool to not get more deeply into. So then I decided to go to medical school, which was a little bit later in the process than others would have expected.

Through making myself available to participate in some work with a colleague, a mentor, in my residency program who was trying to get research started and having a hard time getting any of the residents to be involved. I was curious and willing to put in a little bit of extra time, and so that added to my very few publications from before and brought the question up of whether maybe I should get some research training, which was probably the key step in this process.

And then I looked around, and one of the great things about it is that there's such a scarcity and a need for physicians who want to be researchers that I had lots of opportunities and lots of options. And I chose one of those at the NIMH, which was just amazing, and went there very meekly for a couple of years, thinking, "I hope they don't throw me out before then." And I wound up staying for over 10 and was going to stay there for the rest of my life until I got an offer I couldn't refuse, which was to start a new kind of program here in New York, which has been incredibly exciting and challenging.

And so all of those pieces have kind of led me here, and I find that it's gratifying to be able to go back and pick up perspectives or ways of thinking that I gained along the way that I wouldn't have otherwise come across if I had followed a more traditional streamlined kind of path.

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