Interview with Timothy a. pedley, md, faan: AAN president 2013-2015
Timothy A. Pedley, MD, FAAN
AAN President 2013-2015
Saturday, November 10, 2018
AAN Headquarters
Minneapolis, MN
Interviewer: Tim Streeter, AAN Senior Writer
TS: Hello. My name is Tim Streeter [TS]. I’m with the American Academy of Neurology and I am speaking to Dr. Timothy A. Pedley, who was president of the Academy from 2013 to 2015. Welcome, Dr. Pedley [TP].
TP: Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
TS: Thank you for coming and answering a few questions about your tenure.
TP: It’s nice to be back in Minneapolis.
TS: Well, good. Even with the cold?
TP: Even with the cold.
TS: The first question that I have for you is: why did you want to become a neurologist? What motivated you to go into this field?
TP: Well, I think it was a series of events beginning with some that were entirely fortuitous. When I was in college—Pomona College—they had recently acquired a new electron microscope. I was a biology major because I was intending to go to medical school and my thesis advisor suggested that I do a project on the new electron microscope.
He assigned me doing a study of the rabid superior cervical ganglia, which is a part of the sympathetic nervous system in the neck, which we all have actually. I was intrigued by suddenly seeing what looked to the naked eye just like a little blob but, the detailed structure of neurons, synapses. You could see the vesicles in the synapses that carry the transmitter that conveys the nervous impulse and I got really excited by this very small aspect of the nervous system.
I went to Yale for medical school and I went to the head of physiology there to see if I could continue something along these lines with him. He was very supportive but, his work turned out to be, while very interesting, more fundamental than I wanted. It was very cellular, very neurophysiological which I was interested in. And he suggested that I might be more interested in something that had more clinical relevance and suggested that I meet with Dr. Gil Glaser who was a former president of the Academy—
TS: Right.
TP: —was a former president of the Academy who was working on epilepsy and he was studying neurophysiological mechanisms in cat models of epilepsy looking at how neurons go from firing normally to abnormally that characterizes the epileptic state. That very much intrigued me because I made rounds with him and saw patients with epilepsy and then I would go back to the laboratory and look at the physiology in an animal model of epilepsy. I think that was probably when I decided that neurology was an area that I could combine my interest in seeing patients with nervous system disorders, which I had become interested in and at the same time do research that would have relevance to the human condition.
So, I think that’s how I got interested in neurology and I went then to Stanford where I did my residency in neurology and did additional work with David Prince who was the chairman of neurology at the time and ran a fundamental laboratory in basic neuroscience studying cellular mechanisms of epileptic genesis both in cats and increasingly in brain slices that we maintained in vitro.
So, that’s how I got involved and I moved to Columbia University; I was recruited there by Bud Rowland, another Academy president, in 1978, I think. I had a laboratory there for a while and then gradually moved to clinical research doing family studies of patients with epilepsy getting to look at inheritance patterns and ultimately genetics.
And epidemiological studies with Alan Hauser. So, that’s my career in brief.
TS: And it’s been a very illustrious career.
TP: Well, I spent 40 years at Columbia and retired this past year and it was a very productive time for me in terms of my growth as a person as well as a neurologist and interacting with some wonderful people, many of whom you’d recognize and know.
TS: Now you joined the Academy in 1973. What were you looking for as a young neurologist educator to help you with your career?
TP: Well, I wish I could give you a very informed answer to that question but, in fact, I did it I think as I recall mainly because I assumed it was the principle professional organization for neurologists and that as a developing neurologist, I should belong to the principle professional organization. But I don’t think I had any specific goals beyond that at the time.
Those came later as I learned, for example, how wonderful the courses were, how helpful they were for me studying for boards and then gradually becoming involved in teaching in some of the courses as my career advanced and finding out other things that the Academy had to offer besides the Annual Meetings. So, it was a gradual process that was an evolutionary one I think as I was exposed to more and more of what it did.
Of course, at the same time, the Academy was growing substantially and offering more and more. I think the development of interest groups, epilepsy, for example, was another way that one could interact with a group of colleagues that shared common interests and so on. So, it was a continuing growth kind of thing, growth in increased experience of what was available, and the Academy was continuing to develop significantly at the same time. It was a mutually interactive process that was very formative for me.
TS: Did you have any particular mentors who encouraged you to get involved in the Academy?
TP: I don’t think so particularly. For example, David Prince, whose lab I worked in the 10 years I was at Stanford, was much more involved in the Society for Neuroscience and much more interested in the basic kinds of things.
It was not, I would say at that time—it certainly changed since—but at that time in the department of neurology at Stanford, it was recognized as a home for neurologists but, it wasn’t pushed. I can remember people would say, “Well, should I join the Academy?” And I always said, “Yes, because I think you’ll find it like I did; good for courses, good for meeting people and so on.”
But it was very much self-motivated I would say. Very different from when I went to Columbia. Bud Rowland was a huge proponent of the Academy; he told everybody when they came, “If you’re not a member now, I’m signing you up. So, everybody was a member. Bud also promoted people within the Academy; I mean Stan Fahn. These were all protégés of Bud. He got them involved in committees and that’s how I got involved in committee work. Bud said, “I think you ought to be on a committee; I’m going to speak to somebody about this.” I’ve tried to do the same thing as I became more involved. Because these kinds of things can work to some extent passively but, when I think back at my own career, if I had had an earlier Bud Rowland type saying, “Why don’t you go to this meeting?” and so on and so forth, it might have been even better earlier on.
TS: Right.
TP: So, I took his model as the right one and tried to emulate him when I moved into that position and I think at Columbia we have a very strong relationship with the Academy and the feeling of our residents and fellows and faculty that they belong. They belong to other societies as well—subspecialty societies, the AMA and so on. But I think most of them would view the Academy as their principal one.
TS: There are some individuals like Dr. Rowland who have had such a wide impact both within the specialty of neurology but also within the Academy as well. Like you say, promoting the organization and being very involved.
TP: And Stan Fahn has done the same thing. I think that’s the way it should be. I think those of us who are more senior should indicate how it’s affected us and why we are involved with the Academy and why we continue to be involved in the Academy. I think that’s an important role for us as we become grey-haired and senior.
TS: Yup, you’ve set the example. Now prior to becoming the president in 2013, you were on the Education Committee of the AAN for a number of years; weren’t you?
TP: Actually, no; I was on the Science Committee.
TS: Oh, the Science Committee; okay.
TP: I was chairman of the Science Committee for a while. I would go to the Education Committee as an invitee occasionally because there were often things with the Science Committee and the Education Committee would act in terms of programs, educational courses and so on. I don’t think I was ever really an official member of the Education Committee. Science and Meeting Management were my two principal committees.
TS: What did you enjoy about committee work with the Academy?
TP: I thought the Science Committee was great because it played an important role in designing courses, recommending to the Education Committee potential faculty members for those courses and so on. We were very strong advocates for an important science component in the educational curriculum, a graded one so that more junior people would have more basic material as they acquired experience and so on.
There were much more advanced courses that they could take, and I think most of us on the Science Committee believed that a strong science curriculum was fundamental to the practice of neurology. Neurology has an increasingly strong scientific basis in terms of the rationality for how we practice. Neurologists need to keep up with that; you can’t learn it just once. It’s a continuing process because science changes rapidly and ever more so as time goes on.
I think all of us on the committee felt that science is one of the fundamental core committees of the Academy, particularly in relationship to the Annual Meeting and subsequently the various other kinds of smaller meetings that have developed over the years.
TS: With regard to education during your term, maintenance of certification was a big issue. There was some chaffing from members about the requirements that were put on them by ABPN and ABMS, and we had to communicate that it was the Academy that was not forcing our members to do that. What were the challenges that you found there in trying to explain these things to members?
TP: Like any issue that has a range of views about it, the real challenge was trying to maintain some level of civility and some rationality to the discussion. Because there were groups that represented smallish but not insignificant factions that often took extreme positions. We don’t believe in maintenance of certification at all. There shouldn’t be an examination. Examination was the particular crux of the issue. One group wanted us to cease dealing with the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology; that’s ridiculous. Maintaining civility, trying to focus the discussion on real issues that have the most significance for our members. One of the points I tried to make repeatedly was that this is not just about neurology.
Our patients and their families have expectations that the neurologists they consult are going to be competent, they’re going to be up to date, and that they’re going to practice the most advanced form of a specialty that exists at the time. As a professional organization, we have an obligation to assure that we can offer courses to our members to enable them to do this in the easiest possible way, to not make it overly burdensome. I think it probably was a legitimate issue to determine whether a required examination every few years was a necessary part of that or not; that’s the kind of thing I believed could be discussed but, I tried to take off the table the notion that some demonstration of continuing competence was unnecessary.
TS: Yeah.
TP: I think eventually most people came to agree that, yes, we had an obligation as an organization and as a profession to have some kind of mechanism for assuring continuing competency of our members. The details of that I think can be discussed and that’s sort of where we ended up.
But I still believe very strongly that a fundamental obligation that we have is to assure that—we can’t force our members to be competent, but we can provide them with the environment that enables them. I think most physicians generally, and certainly neurologists, I think want to be as good as they can be. That’s why our courses are successful; that’s why we have not only our traditional Annual Meeting and Fall Conference but a new Winter Conference coming and various other opportunities for people to learn. And they come because they want to learn.
TS: One of the complaints was the cost.
TP: Yes.
TS: And the Academy took steps to help members with that and that was to make those neuro-learned products free to members.
TP: Yes. I think the Academy has done very well in meeting legitimate needs of members through cost reductions; in many cases, as you point out, having free materials. I think the tools that we offer now to members are really amazingly strong, up to date, easy to use, and easy to access. And I think their use and popularity shows that.
TS: As members face more burdens, we do what we can to lift those burdens or ameliorate them.
TP: At least help them deal with them. I think the Academy has done very well there and I hope that will continue to be one of its major focuses, to continue to assure that members have the tools they need at reasonable cost to meet the challenges that are going to continue.
TS: Right, and throughout their career.
TP: Throughout their career. Many career stages.
TS: Absolutely. One of the other issues that has been looming large for some time has been workforce; do we have enough neurologists to meet the needs? That was something that came up during your tenure.
TP: I don’t know what the current answer to that question is but, I do know that neurology training programs seem to be thriving. As new medical schools appear and new hospital residencies develop, they seem to be filled. There is always an influx of foreign graduates, many of whom bring strength to the workforce and in many areas provide singular care that wouldn’t otherwise be available.
My wife was chief of neurology for 36 years at City Hospital in New York City. Their workforce was very heavily foreign graduates. She tried to make sure that they had funds to go to Annual Meetings of the Academy, to go to regional meetings if they couldn’t go to the Annual Meeting because not everybody can go. They had a very limited workforce; I think she had only four neurologists.
I think neurology remains a very attractive specialty for many and I certainly know that we’re very proud of the number of medical students at Columbia that choose neurology.
TS: When you were president you took a particular interest in relationships with international members, with international organizations like the World Foundation of Neurology. Why was that important to you?
TP: The World Federation of Neurology.
TS: Yeah, World Federation.
TP: First of all, the Academy, I think, is the world’s largest neurology organization comprised primarily of individual members. Even the new European Academy of Neurology isn’t anywhere near the size of the Academy. So, by its size alone and given the resources it has, I believe the Academy has an obligation.
One can discuss the size and extent of that obligation but, I believe the Academy has an obligation to work with other organizations around the world; the obvious ones that I think we work most closely with are the World Federation of Neurology and the European Academy of Neurology, which is a relatively new organization. It’s modeled very much on the Academy’s model. Improving neurological services around the world, while not our primary obligation, is one that I believe we can help facilitate, given the limited resources we have.
We obviously have to allocate those appropriately with the primary objective being our home audience, so to speak. We have the means to assist and we’re a major contributor to the World Federation of Neurology. I think that they would be poorer, not able to do the things they do if they didn’t have our help.
We give them the Neurology® journal, for example. It’s a balancing act for us but I think most of us realize that this is a piece of our mission, given our size—the United States. It’s a balancing act but, I think it’s an important role for us.
I think that when you do visit some of these other countries, they’re very appreciative of what the Academy does and I think that when you look at our Annual Meetings, you see a significant number of international attendees. I think that’s also a reflection of what the Academy means on a global level.
TS: The Axon Registry is one of the most significant projects the Academy has taken on and—
TP: And it’s most expensive.
TS: —and one of the most expensive. Why is it so expensive?
TP: I’m not sure I can—somebody like Bruce Sigsbee could give you a very detailed answer to that question. It is expensive; it’s expensive to maintain; it’s large. On the other hand, it is a very, in my view, important way of quality management for the individual neurologist at the local practice level. It is patient-based; the data are electronically accessible directly from the medical record. The Axon Registry has been recognized by organizations as being an effective tool for quality. As I said earlier, I believe that assuring the quality of practitioners’ practices is an important role for the Academy.
So, I was a big supporter of the Axon Registry and though I have been removed from it the last couple of years or so, I have seen no reason to reduce my enthusiasm for it even though I do recognize the cost and the level of support that is required to maintain it. Again, this quality issue is an important one and I think this is one way of trying to bring it into the offices and practices and have it be part of the day-to-day management of patients.
TS: Right. More increasingly, physicians are called upon to prove their value.
TP: Absolutely, and this is one way that they can do that. It’s based on real life data from the patients that they are treating and serving and they have the documents available to do it. It is expensive but, I think it’s an important service that we provide to our members.
TS: I want to talk about advocacy a little bit. There was a major success for the Academy just as your term was ending in 2015, when Congress ended the sustainable growth rate issue that we’d been fighting against for 20 years. As you look back on that, our dealings with Congress: We have lobbyists; other organizations have lobbyists who support members of Congress for various votes and stuff. The cynic could say, “They just kept this going because they were getting their campaign contributions, for us to vote this way or that way.” Or, “They just kicked the can down the road for 20 years; we’ll let somebody else deal with that.” Is that frustrating as a physician, as a neurologist, as the president of the Academy to have to deal with that sort of situation?
TP: Yes, to a certain extent. But I get frustrated reading the newspaper about Congress.
TS: Yes.
TP: It’s the way Congress works, and if you’re going to play ball in their arena, you’ve got to play ball the way they play it. I think the Academy in recent years has been very good at balancing priorities. Which legislation to support, which to oppose, and the costs that are involved in doing that. They’ve had some terrific staff working with Congress.
We’ve had some very good supporters in Congress. Of course there are people who aren’t our supporters but, that’s the way Congress works. I think that Congress is unlikely to change its modus operandi. So, if we’re going to be a player, we’ve got to play according to their rules or lack of rules, whichever it may be.
I don’t see how we can avoid doing that. If we’re going to be advocating on behalf of our members for changes in regulation, changes in legislation, in laws, reimbursements and so on, we have to have a presence in Washington. And we have to be a meaningful presence. It seems to me to be a total waste of money if we don’t have an effective presence. Then you’re just pouring money down the drain. So, I think the goal is accept the fact that it can be a cesspool at times but, that’s the way it works. We need to determine which are the key issues for us, where to put the limited resources we have and have the best people advocating for us that we can. I think we’ve had some significant successes.
TS: Yes. What do you think the outcome is going to be of the debate over health care and access and costs? Are we going to go to single payer?
TP: It’s hard for me to know; I’ve never had a very clear crystal ball. I can tell you my personal view. I think we have the most expensive health care system—it’s approaching 20 percent of the GNP—of any industrialized country in the world, but, if you look at standard quality measures that are generally accepted by public health groups around the world, our quality level is down at the bottom of the same group of industrialized nations. One of the major differences I think is that most of the other industrialized countries have some form of single-payer system. That’s anathema to many in this country but, on the other hand I think we’re reaching a point where we can’t continue to sustain the cost of the health care system that we have.
It’s very inequitable. I recently had a hip replacement and the head of the hip and knee section who did the surgery—very good—but I received a bill for $86,000 for the hip replacement. He doesn’t ordinarily take Medicare but, he did in my case; it was a courtesy.
I still had some additional to pay but, that’s ridiculous. You just can’t do that in today’s world. That’s why there’s this constant battle between cutting back on the amount of medical coverage that’s provided by employers and what employee groups want and need for their families.
I think the country’s either going to go broke through its health care system. If we were getting the top level quality as a result, that would be one thing but, we’re not. The day of reckoning is going to have to come. And there’s going to have to be some changes. I don’t know what those changes will ultimately be but, I would be surprised if single payer isn’t at some point considered.
Obamacare was very popular with the public. The change in Obamacare was a charade that the current administration pushed through but, the surveys that were done around that whole legislative issue showed that the support for Obamacare by the public was huge. My state where I grew up, Arizona, was generally a conservative state but, they’ve kept Obamacare because of the overwhelming public support.
TS: Yeah.
TP: So, I suspect there would be a similar. If we ever got our act together to try to implement even a modified single-payer system of some kind, I suspect there would be quite a bit of support for it at an individual level.
TS: Right. To know that you have some level of care and you’re not going to go broke staying alive.
TP: Exactly. The other thing we’re going to have to come to grips with at some point is doing a better job of working with patients so that they can have a better choice about how they want to end their life; do they want to have everything done to the last minute? Some patients initiate that conversation; most don’t. Some will respond if you initiate it with them but, it’s not at the level of common discussion I would say.
TS: Right.
TP: And most people I think do want a quiet and dignified death. I think you hear many people tell you, “I don’t want to be kept alive if I don’t have any chance of recovery.”
TS: Right, or if you have to be hooked up to a machine.
TP: Exactly. That’s another discussion that we need to have more of on a national level.
TS: When the Academy began to enlarge its offerings to members beyond just the Annual Meeting with the adding of the Fall Conference, the Sports Concussion Conference; we had a Breakthroughs in Neurology Conference. What are your thoughts about that? Does that tend to dilute the value of the Annual Meeting, the attendance at the Annual Meeting? Are we competing against ourselves with these different venues?
TP: I don’t know the answer to that because I haven’t seen recent data about that. Are there data that suggest that the attendance at the Annual Meeting is declining?
TS: I’m not aware of any. No, no, it keeps growing.
TP: That’s what I thought. It’s a very interesting question; if you give a conference, will people automatically come? I was most familiar with the Las Vegas regional conference, Winter Conference. That seemed to attract. I went for several years in a row; that seemed to attract its own constituency in a sense. I don’t know if that’s true of other conferences that we’ve put on as well. It may be that there are certain styles of conference that attract different kinds of members.
TS: Um-hum.
TP: I don’t know that; I’m sure that that could be studied. There may be people in the Academy that know that already. It would not surprise me if that’s the case; people do have different preferences about location; they have preferences about the way the conference is organized and so on.
TS: The number of days I suppose.
TP: We can’t give an unlimited number of conferences but, we probably could continue to do several regional conferences in addition to the main annual conference. I think that’s probably something that we should explore and monitor on an ongoing basis. If they’re successful financially and we maintain a reasonable attendance, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do that.
TS: Or portions online?
TP: Or portions online; exactly.
TS: Perhaps plenary sessions or something like that that people could—.
TP: Yeah, I think exploring all those options are an important part of assessing our role in conferences and who we’re giving them for and who goes to which kind and so on. That probably should be its own study.
TS: As well as how much revenue do we need to generate.
TP: Of course.
TS: To sustain the Academy.
TP: It does no good to give a conference if it’s consistently financially unsuccessful.
TS: Right. You were on the board of AAN Enterprises for several years?
TP: I was. I don’t remember much about it now, frankly. I was on the board and I just don’t remember much about it.
TS: It was just winding down perhaps at the time that you were involved. Dr. Cascino might have been chair at the time and that was designed to give the Academy a for-profit subsidiary that could bring in additional revenue and keep member dues low. Do you have any particular thoughts about that?
TP: No, my recollection is that it just didn’t work out but, I don’t remember the details of why that was.
TS: I think ultimately it was just maybe what the return on investment of staff time was and organizationally.
TP: It just wasn’t meeting its objective of providing a new revenue stream.
TS: You were also on the foundations board.
TP: I was; yes.
TS: What was your interest in that and involvement?
TP: I was interested primarily in trying to develop an independent revenue stream for supporting research and the foundation seemed like a good idea to do that. It floundered a bit I think under an inconsistent leadership approach at the beginning. I think John Mazziotta gave it the best shot in two, three, four years or whatever it was that he was the chair but, it was still very heavily dependent on the Academy for continued support, which is not an ideal situation.
The whole point of having a foundation—probably the cardiologists have the best example of the American Heart Foundation on the one hand and the Professional Cardiology Society on the other hand. That would be the ideal model if we could do that. We haven’t succeeded in doing that. I think that it was a correct step to separate the foundation from the Academy. The Academy continues to provide support, but we’re not their banker.
I hope the foundation will succeed; it would be great for the Academy to have a meaningful foundation that makes substantial contributions for innovative projects for high priority discretionary needs of limited time, but we can’t be the banker for that.
TS: Right.
TP: So, I think this has been a difficult step for the Academy to take; I think it was the correct step for them to take. I hope still that it will work out, find the right niche for ourselves and find the right group of people to lead it and run it.
TS: And the right messaging for the public.
TP: That’s the key. We’ve got to be able to be a recognizable entity that when people think of the brain of neurology, they think of the foundation. That of course is what American Heart has done so successfully. I still have hope that we can do that; I think it would be a terrific achievement if we can because in the long run it would assure the Academy’s ability to do things that otherwise simply won’t be able to do.
TS: One of the things that has evolved over the past few years, we seem to add about 2,000 members every year. We’ve branched out; we brought in business administrators and now we’ve brought in advanced practice providers. How do you see that? Do you look at that as helping the revenue stream to help keep dues low overall? Integrating other care members or other aspects of the practice business into the neurology community?
TP: Well, I hope it will be a positive revenue enhancement although that wouldn’t be my—I don’t want to be a money loser certainly. The way neurology is practiced now, most of us work as members of a team. When I was still practicing, I always had a nurse practitioner with me; usually some other kind of assistant. I always had some medical students and residents too, which were from the medical center.
That’s an effective way to practice as a neurologist. If somebody has already taken essentials of the history, maybe even done an examination and so on, you can be much more efficient and see more patients in a given period of time.
I was very supportive of the idea of bringing some of these physician extenders, if you will, into the Academy because they are so common now certainly in academic practices but in many large group practices as well. Mayo Clinic, for example. Having nurse practitioners, having physicians’ assistants is just to me a logical extension of the Academy’s membership since they are our partners in practice. Why not have them be part of our organization with the physicians they work with as opposed to having them set up their own separate group or something. I don’t know how it’s working out now but, I was a big supporter of that at the time. In the absence of data to the contrary, I would still support that concept.
TS: The advanced practice provider’s membership has gone very well; we’re well over a thousand members right now.
TP: That’s great. I’m glad to hear that.
TS: Another issue has been diversity; not only diversity in membership but diversity on the board, on the staff. How does that strengthen the Academy, or that awareness affect what the Academy does?
TP: I think the organization that represents neurology should reflect the membership including not just the neurologists but the newer groups that are being added as well. It’s very easy in Minnesota to be a white organization. I think our staff does need to reflect to some extent at least the diversity we see out in the world of our membership. I’m very glad that we’ve had leadership programs for minority groups; that we are encouraging nurse practitioners, physician assistants, other physician extenders, and so on becoming part of the membership. I think that we should reflect the rainbow that we live in, which, if you take the country as a whole, is much more diverse than one might think.
TS: Right. Just a couple final questions here; we’re almost near the end. A single two-year term as president; it’s a short period of time. You have a period before that as the president elect and so you’re at running speed when you get the gavel.
TP: Yeah, I think the reality is that—I haven’t talked to many others about this but, my experience was that the second year of your president elect term and the first year of your president term are where you’re most influential. Because you arranged your appointments and so on during your second year as president elect and you were most effective as the leader in the first year of your presidential term. The transition was already beginning to occur in your second year.
TS: Right.
TP: As the new president elect was beginning to think about his appointments and so on. I don’t know how to avoid that situation; that’s the way it is. That’s true with any kind of succession, democratic succession at least. That’s just the way it is. I think what you realize is that you actually have a limited time to make an impact and then you hope that some of these things that you put in place will carry over; some of them probably won’t. Then your successor will have his or her term.
Just a comment. I’m very pleased to see that our three candidates that we’re going to be interviewing later today and tomorrow for president elect are all women.
TS: Really?
TP: And it has been one of my personal—I don’t know whether “embarrassment” is the right word but, my objectives for the Academy. To have had only one woman president in its entire history is a disgrace.
TS: Yes.
TP: Now is the time we may be able to change that. And when we get two women presidents in succession, we will know we’ve made the success. It won’t be just a random flip of a coin. I’m very pleased at that.
TS: What was the best part of your presidency from a personal standpoint?
TP: Oh, the people. Working with the Academy staff is phenomenal; I wish I had a staff like this when I was running a department. I had some very good people but the Academy staff is uniformly at such a high level throughout the organization and it was a constant pleasure.
People anticipated what needed to be done; often had it half-way, if not entirely, done by the time, you know. Everybody was pleasant. I enjoyed working with them as friends, colleagues. It’s a remarkable organization. I’ve belonged to many professional organizations, but this is without question the best.
TS: What advice would you have to someone just beginning their career, someone who has just become a member of the Academy?
TP: Go to meetings. Volunteer. Proactively seek to be on a committee. Don’t demand that you be on a particular committee. Get involved and get to know the staff. Getting to know the staff is very important.
Staff have the board’s ears and I would frequently ask Christy [Christine E. Phelps, Deputy Executive Director of the American Academy of Neurology Institute] or Cathy [AAN CEO Catherine M Rydell, CAE] or somebody, “What do you think about this position? Who do you think would be a good person in your experience to fill out this committee that has two openings on it?” I’d usually get very good suggestions and usually it wasn’t just a suggestion; there would be several names and I could pick among them. The input from the staff was critical to my view and that’s one of the great things about working here. Staff is informed and knowledgeable, very skilled, extremely professional. Some of the best I’ve ever worked with.
TS: Good. I’m quite impressed with our organization, even being part of it.
TP: It’s worth being proud of.
TS: Yes. Thank you so much for your time.
TP: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity.