Serendipity Posted on February 15, 2006 David J. Kupfer (bio) talks about his non-linear career path.

So, I did my medical internship in New York, came back to Yale, did one year of psychiatric residency, and then actually went down to the National Institutes of Health. I didn't know that when I had applied there were 4 positions for 500 people who had applied; otherwise I would not have applied.

I was selected for an interview. I went down to Washington, and I was interviewed, and they were looking for people who had had experience working with animals, because they were trying to develop animal models in psychiatry. Because of my dog surgery experience in urology, I was selected to work in this biological psychiatry group.

I was interested in sleep, but the people who interviewed me for the sleep program did not evince any interest in me, because I had had no experience doing electroencephalograph in sleep. No experience. True. So I was selected to go down there as basically an "animal surgeon" who was going to do those things. Three weeks before I'm ready to go down there, the person who is in the sleep program asks me would I switch, because he really wasn't interested in sleep anymore. We got everybody's permission, so I went down to Washington, and that's where I learned to do sleep research.

By the time I came back, I had decided that I was sufficiently interested in sleep and interested in research that I really wanted to do research in psychiatry. That's how that began.

Again, as we were talking earlier, the road is always ... To my mind, anything that looks linear, if you inquire, is not really linear, and we always talk about rewriting Russian history, so most of the time you rewrite the linearless and make it linear, but I would say that pretty much everything that's happened to me, even sitting here in Pittsburgh, has not been linear.

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