Paul Mischel credits his deep interest in science and the natural world to growing up in a house that contained nearly 3,000 books. “My favorite times were spent in the library with my father reading books about science,” he says. When his father died from stomach cancer when Mischel was just 14 years old, he says it was life-altering. “I promised myself I wanted to do something about it,” he says. After receiving his medical degree from Cornell University Medical College and completing postdoctoral research training at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California (UC), San Francisco, Mischel joined the faculty of UC Los Angeles as a physician-scientist in 1998. Perplexed that some of his brain cancer patients weren’t getting better, Mischel realized that he was missing something important. “I decided to take a very different vantage point,” he says. After moving to UC San Diego in ...
Contributors
Meet some of the people featured in the April 2021 issue of The Scientist.


Become a Member of
Keywords
Meet the Author
Kerry Grens
Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.
View full profileAsher Jones
Asher is a former editorial intern at The Scientist. She completed a PhD in entomology from Penn State University, and she was a 2020 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Voice of America. You can find more of her work here.
View full profile