My Story...
My career has been guided less by careful planning than by curiosity, serendipity, intellectual honesty, and the courage to follow important questions.
I did not set out to become a psychiatrist. I set out to become a physician and a scientist.
After medical school in India, I chose pathology because it offered a pathway into medical research at a time when research opportunities were scarce. That decision led me to neuroscience — first at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, then the University of Sydney, and eventually the National Institutes of Health. By the time I arrived in the United States, I had spent nearly a decade studying the brain.
When it became necessary to complete a U.S. residency, psychiatry drew me because it held some of the most fascinating unanswered questions in medicine. The workings of the human mind are one of the last great frontiers in science, and I wanted to help understand it.
While interviewing for an adult schizophrenia research position at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), I happened to meet Judith Rapoport, who described an ambitious study of childhood-onset schizophrenia. What impressed me most was the intellectual courage behind the work. I joined her team and this decision shaped the rest of my career.
Over the next two decades, I worked with extraordinary children and families. The science mattered, but the greatest lessons came from the people themselves. The children taught me humility. Their parents taught me resilience. The nurses, therapists, teachers, and colleagues taught me compassion and the importance of making people feel safe.
I felt one of the greatest disappointments of my career when the Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia study ended. Looking back, I see that the close of one chapter opened another; it led me to build the Office of Clinical Research at NIMH, and later to join the American Psychiatric Association, where I serve as the Vice President of Research and Deputy Medical Director.
Throughout, I have tried to approach science with curiosity and intellectual honesty. Good science demands that we follow the evidence wherever it leads. As a physician, I have always believed that science alone is not enough. Patients deserve to feel heard, respected, safe, and never rushed. They deserve physicians willing to say “I don’t know” and who are committed to finding the answer. Above all, they deserve care that places their interests ahead of professional ego.