Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD, is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Jamison is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, and Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. She is author or co-author of more than 100 scientific papers about mood disorders, creativity, and psychopharmacology.
As a founder of UCLA's Affective Disorder Clinic and a co-author of a standard medical text on bipolar disorder, Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on the subject. She is also one of its survivors. It is this dual perspective as both a psychiatric expert in bipolar disorder and a sufferer of the disease that makes Jamison's scientific autobiography, An Unquiet Mind, so profoundly affecting.
Jamison, the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, was distinguished lecturer at Harvard University in 2002 and the Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2003. She is a John P. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow.