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Carrie Bearden is a Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include genetic and neurobiological risk factors for developmental neuropsychiatric disorders. For International Women’s Day, we caught up with Carrie and asked her to walk us through a day in her life.

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I wake up at…

6:30am (rough for me since I’m a night owl). Once I’m out of bed I do a little stretching and start thinking about the day ahead. I’ll then get started on lunches for my kids. They head to school around 7:15 and then I walk /run around the neighbourhood with our two nutty dogs (rescue mutts). I love listening to podcasts while I walk them – right now I’m listening to the first season of Serial which is amazing.

My commute involves…

Biking in, because luckily for me I live really close to campus! I’m very grateful for this because LA traffic is not fun.

My typical day looks like…

I have a lot of international collaborations so at least 2 or 3 days a week I have an early morning conference call, but one of my favorite times is when I have a quiet morning, and can just sit with a good mug of coffee whilst reading an article or work on a manuscript and not feel like I’m rushing to the next thing. One thing I love about this job is there really isn’t a ‘typical’ day – it’s a mix of research- writing, staring at data – and clinical activities, meetings with students and colleagues, going to seminars.

Worst part of your job…

Doodle polls.

Best part of your job…

I love hearing about what students are working on, and I must admit I love going to conferences. It’s like I return to my grad school self and just focus on absorbing a whole bunch of new information- plus its always so much fun to see former students and get together for dinner. But as far as the daily routine goes- when I think about it, I feel intense gratitude for the freedom that comes with this job. When I ride my bike to work, I’m thinking about how to solve a problem or something I just read. It’s good to keep your brain fresh.

In another life, I would be a…

Primatologist. I always admired Jane Goodall and so I had a vague fantasy of doing fieldwork observing chimpanzee behaviour – sadly in the real world I don’t think I am patient enough, but maybe in another life. Or maybe an oceanographer – I worked at a marine mammal lab studying dolphin behaviour before I went to grad school. So that’s another future life.

My first day on the job…

I was about 34 weeks pregnant, so I felt huge. That’s about all I can remember!

After work I…

Try to always get home by 6 to make dinner with my family; we usually cook something together, play with the dogs, and we have favorite TV series that we watch an episode of together. It’s a fun little break. Oh, and on Mondays my daughter and I volunteer at an animal rescue. Then usually me and my son (he’s a senior in high school) stay up til around midnight working (homework for him, and I’m usually working on a grant or paper or just dealing with all the emails I didn’t get to in the day!)

My career advice is…

Get out of your comfort zone more and learn something new; go to workshops, push yourself to learn new methods.  And don’t say you don’t have time right now, because it’s only going to get worse in terms of how busy you get!

My last recommendation was...

I just did a new recommendation today, on a new exome sequencing study in schizophrenia trios just published in Nature Neuroscience. It’ s so exciting to see the pace of genetic discovery really accelerating in schizophrenia.

I like being a member of the F1000Prime Faculty because there’s so much great science being published all the time, and it pushes me a bit to explain why a selected article represents an advance and is worth reading. The hard part is just that there are so many new papers I’d like to recommend and I can’t read them all!

If you are interested in trying out F1000Prime, you can register today for a 30-day free trial.