I grew up in Tucson, and moved away to the San Francisco Bay Area for college and medical school. I graduated from Stanford University with a BA in Human Biology. After college I worked as a teaching assistant at a school for kids with emotional and behavioral issues, and then later at The School of Sleep Medicine, Inc., a small company that teaches board review courses in sleep medicine. After working for a few years, I enrolled in a post-baccalaureate program at the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). I decided to stay in San Francisco while I applied to medical school and worked at the Memory and Aging Center in the Neurology Department at UCSF. Through an NIH grant, I helped to develop a battery of tests to evaluate executive functioning in various neurologic disorders. I also met my future husband, David Dean, while working on the project. I graduated from UCSF School of Medicine and returned to Tucson, Arizona for residency. My husband, David, graduated from the University of California-Berkeley (which happens to be Stanford's rival) and works as a computer programmer these days, when he isn't playing golf. We have two awesome dogs, Jack and Jules, both Labrador mixes.
