ABOVE: TALKING IT THROUGH: Jehannine Austin, a neuro-psychiatric geneticist and psychiatric genetic counselor, helps people with eating disorders understand the biological roots of their conditions.
COURTESY OF JEHANNINE AUSTIN
Cynthia Bulik began her scientific career studying childhood depression. But while she was working as a research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, psychiatrist David Kupfer asked her to help write a book chapter comparing electroencephalography studies in depression and anorexia. As preparation, she shadowed a psychiatrist at a hospital inpatient unit for people with eating disorders.
Bulik was intrigued by what she witnessed there. “These people were my age, my sex, and weighed half as much as I did,” she says. “They seemed very eloquent and interactive, but at the same time, in this one area of their psychology and biology, they occupied a completely different space.”
Now the founding director of the Center of Excellence for Eating ...
