‘A Responsibility That I Cherish’: Dr. Judith Ford on Leading BBRF’s Scientific Council

Judith M. Ford, Ph.D.
Co-Director, Brain Imaging and EEG Lab
Professor, Department of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
Senior Research Career Awardee
San Francisco VA Health Care
President, BBRF Scientific Council
2003 BBRF Independent Investigator

One day I got a call. It was Dr. Herbert Pardes, and he was calling to tell me that I had been elected to BBRF’s Scientific Council. It was a real shock! First of all, I’m not even sure I knew that I had been nominated. But more than that, I couldn’t believe that he called to deliver the news!”

This is Dr. Judith Ford remembering a day about 16 years ago, when seemingly out of the blue, one of the most eminent figures in American psychiatry took the time, personally, to let her know that she was now part of the body that he and a handful of other eminent doctors had established, decades earlier.

It was a message that conveyed congratulation, but also a sense of the stakes. Being appointed to the Council was not just an honorary gesture. It was an elevation to an active group with a critical mission. Accepting the position involved important work that one performed voluntarily, and for the most part, invisibly.

Dr. Pardes and a few colleagues had founded the Scientific Council in 1987 to guide the awarding of research grants to deserving investigators—an event coordinated with the establishment that same year of the non-profit foundation issuing the grants, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, or NARSAD. (In 2011, the name was changed to the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.)

Anyone who knew Dr. Pardes well knew that the Council, and BBRF, were one of the most important commitments of his long and highly influential career in psychiatry and medicine, which included directorship of the National Institute of Mental Health under two U.S. presidents and serving for a dozen years as CEO of New York’s largest hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian.

Beginning from a tiny core, BBRF’s Scientific Council, which provides scientific guidance to the Foundation by independently selecting annual grant and prize recipients, now comprises over 190 members, drawn from all fields and subfields of psychiatry, neuroscience, and related disciplines.

Dr. Pardes thought of the Scientific Council as his baby. “I was touched that he made this call personally—he did not relegate it to his staff or email,” Dr. Ford remembers. “I soon learned that he approached the Scientific Council as family, a family that he started and maintained. I loved the summer meetings of the Council when I had a chance to see how ‘the best of the best’ runs meetings—Herb was efficient, effective, and fair.”

“Some years ago,” Dr. Ford continues, “I was asked, along with Dr. Suzanne Haber, to lead the committee of the Scientific Council that directs the annual selection of the BBRF Young Investigator grantees. I was honored and excited to play a more vital role in BBRF’s mission. And it was then that I got the opportunity to work more closely with Herb.”

In late April 2024, Dr. Pardes passed away at the age of 89. Later that spring, Dr. Ford was the choice of the BBRF Board to carry forward the legacy.

“In recent years, I had stepped in for Herb when he needed a bit of help. Of course, it is daunting now to step into his shoes, but I am a BBRF zealot and want to do whatever I can to keep Herb’s vision alive and move the Scientific Council forward in its mission.”

RESEARCH ON HALLUCINATIONS

Judith Ford is the daughter of a scientist who worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, tracking radioactive fall-out from above- and below-ground tests of nuclear bombs. When the Second World War ended, her father got his Ph.D. in chemistry and in 1949 started working at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, when nuclear testing was in its ascendency. Judith Ford spent her youth in Los Alamos, “a totally weird place to grow up,” she concedes, because of its remarkable (and intentional) isolation. She got her B.A. in psychology at Stanford, after becoming interested in “attitudinal change,” and went on to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Stanford’s Medical School. In her doctoral work, she began to focus on human attention—a subject that is related in an interesting way to the research that she is now known for, which involves problems of perception in people with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

“The real pivot” in her early academic career came when she took a year off from grad school and worked in a laboratory in which EEG (electroencephalography) was used to probe the workings of the brain. In EEG, electrodes are placed on the scalp and recordings are made of electrical activity generated by the workings of the collectivity of neurons, billions of them. The waves are measured in several key wavelengths (among them, alpha, beta, theta, and delta) which have been found to correspond with particular mental operations. Young Dr. Ford found EEG to be a kind of wonder, “a window onto the brain.”

She has used EEG and other tools to probe the mystery of auditory hallucinations in psychosis. This is a difficult subject to study, in part because of the powerful stigma associated with the phenomenon of hallucinations. Put simply: patients who experience hallucinations hear “voices” that do not correspond with objective reality. But how does one tell (or convince) another person that what they are experiencing is “not real”? If one cannot trust one’s own senses, what can one trust? This goes to the core of personhood.

It may be tempting to say: the voices that patients hear “are not real,” but for those who hear these sounds, they are absolutely real, and often, upsetting and terrifying, and sometimes, in Dr. Ford’s words, “commanding”— seemingly urging an individual to take particular actions. For this reason, Dr. Ford has found, “many patients are guarded and are not inclined to tell you about what they’re experiencing. You need to give a person time to trust you before they will tell you about their experiences.”

“Talking to patients about their lives and trying to understand their symptoms is one of the most interesting things I do. You can learn a lot about what might be going on in the brain by listening to how patients describe these experiences.”

Among her many published papers is one that notes that “the phenomenology of inner experience is hard to describe.” By this, Dr. Ford means that it is hard for anyone, and not only people with schizophrenia, to describe what is going on inside their thought process—to the extent we are even aware that we are “thinking.” So much of what we do, while the result of brain operations, is not something we are consciously aware of.

When a person says, “I hear a voice saying such and such” when no one else can hear it, we ask a basic question: how do people process sensations and know whether or not they themselves were the source of that sensation? Another question might be: is our perception accurate? In other words, does it correspond with “objective reality?”

To sum up a great deal of thinking and careful research performed by Dr. Ford and colleagues over many years, she is working to flesh out the hypothesis that auditory hallucinations result from misperceptions of sensations— sensations and perceptions that originate within the self, but are attributed to external sources, outside the self. Dr. Ford’s hypothesis centers on mechanisms in the brain that are responsible for predicting how to act or what to think on the basis of sensations and perceptions. It’s a fundamental operation of the brain that is bound up with basic survival at the most elemental level. If an individual (human or animal) is out in the environment and trying to process sensations, it is absolutely essential to be able to distinguish thoughts or sensory perceptions that are generated within (or by) the self from inputs that are coming “from the outside.” In evolutionary terms, to know that a sound you made is yours (as opposed to coming from outside) may be the difference between safety and danger in an encounter with a predator.

Dr. Ford and others have closely studied a phenomenon called “corollary discharge.” It’s part of the process that “enables an individual to determine if what it is experiencing is coming from ‘self’ or not.”

The corollary discharge research helps explain how we are able to accurately predict, and to have a realistic picture of the external environment, as a guide for action. Importantly: when there is a dysfunction in this mechanism, the research posits, and there is a problem making such predictions, someone may sense a thought as coming from the outside, whereas in fact it is really coming from inside. This may be what is happening in at least some cases when someone “hears voices” when no one is talking. The “voice” may not be “out there” in the environment; instead, it may be a misperception of one’s own thoughts that are present in one’s own mind.

THE CARDINAL PRINCIPLES

Today, Dr. Ford is Co-Director of the Brain Imaging and EEG Lab and a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and a Senior Research Career Awardee with the San Francisco VA. She has authored or co-authored over 220 scientific papers, but she is also the mother of two adult daughters and one teen-aged son. Her academic path from Stanford to Yale, and from Yale to UCSF, was energized by a deep commitment to research, but it was unconventional.

One remarkable fact about her career is that, despite her long list of publications and her success in obtaining major, career-sustaining NIH grants and in leading NIH-sponsored clinical trials, she did not work full-time as a research scientist until her younger daughter had left home for college. During the girls’ early years, “at a certain point, I started taking the desktop computer in my office home in the back of my station wagon and would plug it in when I got home. I’d put the girls to bed at 7:30… and start working.” This was before laptops. She admits: “My friends were amazed that I could put the girls to bed so early!”

Like every other member of BBRF’s Scientific Council, Dr. Ford volunteers her time to the task. Over the last decade, she and Dr. Haber have had one of the more labor-intensive tasks to perform each year, organizing the Scientific Council members in reviewing as many as 1,000 annual applications for the BBRF Young Investigator grant. In recent years, 150 grantees have been selected annually.

In this work, Drs. Ford and Haber have put into practice several of the cardinal organizing principles put in place by Dr. Pardes and colleagues when the Council was founded. The first principle is merit. Members of the selection committees, she explains, set their sights on finding the best grantees possible, which in the BBRF universe means: funding the very best science, projects deemed to have the greatest potential to move the field forward. It means considering applicants from anywhere in the world. It means looking at who the applicants have studied with and how they are supported by their current institutions.

In back of these considerations is one principle that Dr. Pardes often stressed. In his words, typically succinct: “no politics.” As Dr. Ford with equal brevity explains this vital point which has helped NARSAD, and later BBRF, earn the admiration and credibility it has within the scientific world: “There is no place for favoritism. There are no thumbs on the scale.” Her co-administration of the Young Investigator grants has schooled her and Dr. Haber in “taking the precautions to prevent conflicts of interest.”

“We are very careful with institutional conflicts,” she says. “If you have an applicant from Yale, then Scientific Council members who are on the Yale faculty must step aside and are assigned to another set of applications. Even if they have never heard of the applicant.” This rigor, combined with the attention to the scientific merit of the proposed projects, is what gives the Young Investigator grants the reputation they have had since the early days of NARSAD.

Another cardinal principle concerns the functional separation of the Scientific Council from BBRF’s Board of Directors and the professional staff that administers the grants and raises money to fund them. Between the staff’s fund-raising activities and the Council’s selection of grantees there always must be, Dr. Pardes liked to say, “a wall as inviolable as that between Church and State.” Neither BBRF staff nor the BBRF Board has any role in deciding who should or will receive BBRF grants.

When Council members are assessing grant applications, they weigh the merits of the science, while being attentive to identifying “out-of-the-box” ideas that are relatively high-risk but with outsized potential rewards. They are also sensitive to how the award will serve the investigator and her/his career. Over the decades the grants have helped thousands of recipients build their careers, especially in the early days when seed funding is needed to get initial results that can serve as the basis for much larger career-sustaining federally funded grants. “But also, the process is about how the results of the grantee’s project will contribute to the field, to knowledge…and not least, how this will serve our ultimate concern, which is improving the lives of people living with brain and behavioral disorders,” Dr. Ford says. “This is Herb’s vision, and it’s what we’re dedicated to keep going.”

CALLING NEW MEMBERS

“I think we’ve been pretty successful. One of my favorite things right now is to talk to people who didn’t know I have taken on the position that Herb left when he passed away. I cannot tell you how many say, ‘Oh, I had one of those [BBRF] grants. It totally changed the direction of my career.’ At the annual Symposium this past October, one of the BBRF outstanding achievement prize winners—one of the most accomplished people in psychiatric research today—told me a that if he hadn’t gotten the BBRF grant he received early on, he would not be doing the work he’s doing today, 30 years later! And you hear that over and over again. I think it’s fair to say we’re having a lot of success.”

Dr. Ford helps direct the annual search for new Scientific Council members, as the Council’s membership changes as the science advances and new areas of expertise need to be represented in order to most effectively assess the latest group of grant applicants. “We look for people who have breadth, because we try to match up an applicant with reviewers who know something about their field. People with breadth are those who are editors- in-chief of the various scientific journals. They are people who have proven themselves in terms of productivity, funding, visibility, expertise. They lead departments of psychiatry and neuroscience and related fields in academic institutions. In short, they are the people who are leaders in our profession, across the whole range of sub-fields that come under psychiatry and neuroscience—leaders in the field.”

Thinking back 16 years to her first call with Dr. Pardes and her invitation to the Council, Dr. Ford says: “Needless to say, I was thrilled. And his phoning me directly has set for me a kind of standard. Now I am the one who calls people who have been elected to the Council. It’s not only an honor to do this; it’s fun. I can’t tell you how often I run into people who say, ‘Why can’t I be on the Council? Why doesn’t somebody nominate me?’ So, I am taking this new responsibility very seriously. It is one that I cherish.”

Written By Peter Tarr, Ph.D.

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