I don’t really come from a background filled with scientists or engineers or doctors. My relatives were mostly businessmen and artists, but just about everyone in my family was an outdoors person. They all liked natural history and the idea that if you were a careful enough observer of the natural world, you could decipher how the world works. I myself wasn’t really an outdoors person, however, and preferred playing football in the park or reading. I complained as much as I could get away with when I had to go camping or fishing or hiking. Still, somehow it filtered in that observation and deduction could tell you how things work, and the idea must have stuck.

I started school at the University of New Mexico in studio art. I loved wielding big chunks of steel together in my sculpture classes, but I realized I didn’t love it enough to do it for the rest of my life. My problem with art was that there was never any certainty, and if I was going to spend all my time and energy on a problem, I wanted to at least have the chance of finding a right or wrong answer. Based on my exposure to natural history, I moved into biology. The basic experiments that you start with in biology classes are—let’s face it—not all that exciting, but I realized that I enjoyed scholarship, the process of knowing a subject deeply and trying to use what is already known to come to new conclusions. As I got more and more involved in biology, I got interested in how the anatomy of a little wild mouse, the grasshopper mouse, allowed it to be a ferocious carnivore, when externally it didn’t look all that different from every other kind of little wild mouse.

Doing my research into anatomic specializations of this mouse, I quickly went through all the anatomy and physiology classes that were offered in the Biology Department at UNM. I started taking courses with the medical students, and had my second big realization. I realized that you could specialize in a really esoteric facet of science, or you could try and integrate what interested you with the work of lots of other experts and look at bigger questions. Medical schools do this all the time, with groups of people asking questions that might for example focus on cellular metabolism in the brain, but also on the impact of illegal drugs on modulating that metabolism. From this introduction to medicine it was a quick slide into medical school, and then into psychiatry and neuroanatomy.

In the end, I ended up in a very specialized field of research, where we examine the responses of parts of the brain to visual perception of facial expressions. But we try to relate this to a much bigger question, about how people with some mental illnesses don’t seem to relate well to other people and about how you might find ways to help the mentally ill get along better in society. It’s the most creative thing I’ve ever done – far more creative than anything I did as an art student – and it’s about as much fun as you can have and get paid for it.

Stephen Lewis