Judith Walters: Mentor Extraordinaire
BY RACHEL SCHEINERT, NIMH
Judith “Judie” Walters is a self-described “product of a women’s college”—Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She was confident she could tackle academic challenges and assume leadership roles in whatever she chose to do. At college she had fallen in love with the emerging field of neuropharmacology—the study of how drugs affect the brain. There was no question in her mind that she would go on to pursue a career in science. But when she applied to graduate school in the late 1960s, one male interviewer asked, “Why do you want to get a Ph.D.? You’re a woman!” Unfazed, Walters went on to earn a Ph.D. in pharmacology from Yale. Today she is chief of the Neurophysiological Pharmacology Section in the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
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