Dawn Jessup

I would attribute almost all of my success to very good mentors and my mother and my grandmother, who were very strong-willed women in business. Without them as direct and clear examples, I would not have gotten this far at all. Everyone but me, really. Like many people before me, I've been fortunate to have these strong influences on my life who showed me what was possible and helped guide me along the way.

The best advice I ever got was when I was young and in undergraduate, and I was asking my mentor what I should do because I wasn't satisfied with forensic science and I wanted to know what to do with the rest of my life. It's a very difficult question for any mentor to answer. But the best advice I ever got was, well, no one's going to open the door for you and lead you through it. You're going to have to be the one to initiate that. So if I had to give advice to the next generation, it would almost certainly always be, you know, whatever you do, do it with purpose, because no one's going to open that door for you.

I would suggest to young women entering my industry that there will still be setbacks. There will be times when it feels like the deck is a little stacked against you. But they are fortunate that they now live in a time where there have never been more women in science. Seeking out those spaces and leaning on each other is of tremendous benefit, and I would highly suggest they take full advantage of that, especially when times are tough. We are very fortunate to be in this moment where there are more women in science than ever before, and that network of support is invaluable.

The biggest challenges in drug dependence right now are lack of funding and regulatory uncertainty. The lack of funding is fairly self-explanatory - both in terms of our friends in criminal justice and on our side of things, which is the biomedical clinical intervention side. More resources certainly help address more problems. But the biggest opportunities right now are for young scientists getting in and asking important questions that are not just about the basic anatomy and physiology of addiction, but being able to ask questions about how this affects the clinical aspect and how it affects the patient directly. We've done a lot of work over the last 30 years to explain the basic physiology and anatomy of addiction science, and we're sitting at a very interesting time in this field where, because of advances in technology, we are able to start asking more human-driven questions. What students of the next 10 years will be able to ask will be much more translationally interesting - not just about the mechanism of how it works, but almost directly about how it affects a person directly. When you're not directly working on a patient, you can be a little distant from those kinds of questions, but we've found a point in this field where those questions are a little bit easier to address. I think it's a very exciting time for incoming students.

I think having worked both in counterterrorism, drugs of abuse, and medicine broadly, one of the things that we as academics and scholars are drilled with every time is that at the end of the day, you're going to reach a point in your career where people will take you at face value. And at that point, you are only as good as your word. So integrity and honesty are the most important things. I think that, especially in this day and age, being true to your word and being honest with yourself, both professionally and personally, are the most important values.