1997 Annual Report
Sandra Wilson, Ph.D.
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Medicine, psychology and music have run parallel courses in Sandra Wilson's life, even as a young child on the West Side of St. Paul, Minnesota. "From the time I was really little I knew my career would be in medicine or psychology, or some combination thereof," she says.
Now with a lengthy list of research accomplishments behind her, Dr. Wilson is continuing her interests in health care and psychology as the new head of the Department of Health Services Research at PAMF's Research Institute--with music a strong theme in her personal time.
Her interest in medicine emerged early: In first grade she shared, in "show and tell," news of a neighbor with an ectopic (tubal) pregnancy, overheard from an adult conversation. "It caused quite a stir!" she recalls of the teacher's phone call home.
Interspersed with childhood adventures with her brother, Jeffrey, and sister, Claudia, and friends--crayfish-catching, baseball, winter skating on a nearby swamp-pond, being a Campfire Girl, "spending hours sitting up in trees with friends"--Sandra found time to play piano and read, often about medicine or psychology.
"My brother and I both took piano lessons very willingly," she recalls. Music came naturally: "My mother grew up in a family that had stringed instrumentalists, symphony musicians, including the musical director of the Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra. But she would never have let us take the violin because, she said, "On a piano if you hit a wrong note at least it is a note."
By junior high school, her interest in a medical career was a serious commitment. But, she recalls, "I had no role models and was convinced that to go to medical school you were supposed to know already a huge amount about medicine and anatomy. So I went to the St. Paul Public Library downtown and read every old medical book they had. I was interested in the psychological and neurological side, so I read Freud and Pavlov. It was fascinating. And I was studying anatomy, memorizing all the bones and muscles and where the tendons inserted."
She never finished high school. In her junior year, the guidance office "didn't know what to do with me when I said I planned to be a physician," she recalls. "They phoned the university to see if there was some exam they could give to find out whether I really should do this! They thought it was a poor choice for a girl." Fortunately, the University of Minnesota counselors asked if anyone had considered early college admission. "My ears perked up. High school moved too slowly from my perspective."
After a summer of testing, she was admitted and became a pre-med student, majoring in both psychology and in zoology--"so I still had one foot in each camp," she recalls. Approaching graduation, she was tempted by a double M.D./Ph.D. program in physiology, but ultimately decided on a straight Ph.D.: "I knew I wanted to do research but wasn't sure, at that critical choice point, about clinical practice. Looking back, I think that no matter which fork I chose in that road, I would have probably ended up doing research very much like what I am doing now. I just wouldn't have gone through so many loops to get there."
The first loop encompassed Stanford University. Her undergraduate adviser encouraged her to study with a group of mathematical psychologists at Stanford. But this took her away from physiology, and she shifted into physiological psychology. Her dissertation investigated visual perception and brain function in primates. She received her Ph.D. in 1968, was offered a faculty position at Cornell, but instead accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford on a National Institutes of Health bio-behavioral training grant.
She also married and had a son, Robert Wilson II, shortly after completing her postdoctoral work. In 1970 she joined the American Institutes of Research (AIR), located in the Palo Alto foothills, working with AIR's founder, John C. Flanagan, Ph.D.
"As I was working with him, studying the long-term effects of education on individuals' quality of life as adults, it became clear that if he could do research on education, then I could do research that involved patients. Why not? AIR didn't have either a school or a hospital," she says. Her team received a contract to revise and develop materials for the national Medical College Admission Test. She directed that work for the next 17 years, while doing research on career decision-making by physicians.
Over time, Dr. Wilson focused her interests into research on asthma and other health problems with medical and behavioral science colleagues, eventually creating, in 1979, the Institute for Health Care Research at AIR. In 1992 she became a volunteer clinical faculty member in the Stanford Medical Center's Department of Medicine, in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.
Dr. Wilson learned that PAMF's Research Institute was planning to create a new Department of Health Services Research as a successor to the decades of prestigious research on medical economics by Anne Scitovsky, now retired.
In 1997, Dr. Wilson and several colleagues joined the Institute. Their work includes studies on how to improve outcomes for asthma patients through education and how best to encourage safer-sex practices in specific populations. Her team continues to develop and do controlled studies of patient-education and health-promotion programs. They will be assessing the impact on patient care and caregivers of the new electronic medical record (EMR) being pilot tested at PAMF and at a Sutter Health affiliate in Davis, working with Sutter's EMR Evaluation Group.
Dr. Wilson still plays piano, and sings soprano with the Bay Area's Baroque Choral Guild chorus. She is a member of the Wesley United Methodist Church in Palo Alto, and is in what she hopes is the last phase of remodeling a 1950s-vintage home. She enjoys skiing and hiking with friends at Lake Tahoe and Mt. Hood.
Dr. Wilson says joining the Institute is a bit like "coming home" because of her laboratory-research background and many years of working with physicians and scientists on multidisciplinary projects. "It creates new opportunities to work with clinicians and researchers from PAMF, throughout Sutter Health and at Stanford," melding her lifelong interests in health care and psychology.