Strange Corners and Trajectories Posted on February 28, 2006 John Landsverk (bio) describes his convoluted path to becoming a research scientist.

I was married by then, and after two years, my wife came home one day and said, "I'm going to California because there's a new therapy out there that I've read about primal therapy, and I want to get trained in it." She was a LCSW. I said, "Alright, I'll come along."

I spent about two years doing that, but I wasn't very good at it to tell you the truth, and besides, mini-computers were coming out. IBM had really put them out, and I thought, "Boy, I'd really like to be involved in research into the use of computers in clinical work," so I called ... I was, I think, 39.

I called my old professor who was the training director at NIMH, and I said, "Ken, I've been messing around out here doing all kinds of crazy things. I think I'd like to get into the research game."

Now he knew me, and he knew I was smart and all that sort of thing, and he said, "You know, you've got a Ph.D. in sociology, but you have clinical background. I know it's a little strange, but you actually know what it's like to be a clinician. We don't have many people like that with good research backgrounds."

So I went to visit him, and he told me about post-doc programs, and there was one at Hopkins, one at Yale, and one at UCLA, and that's what I decided to take because they had ...

Someone had split from the program, and they had one year left on it, and I had a very very close friend and I knew a guy who was in charge of it, because we had been out eating and drinking for many years, and Leo said, "Come on back." So I did a post-doc at the age of 40, and then I've been doing research ever since.

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