Dr. Caite Meyer

By Gregg Shields

Not only does Dr. Caite Meyer have a family history in medicine, her grandfather, Dr. George Meyer, was a psychiatrist and former President of the American Psychiatric Association.

But the 2016 winner of the North Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians Award for Outstanding Medical Student in Psychiatry already has started building her own reputation in the field.

As an undergraduate at Cornell University, Dr. Meyer spent her summers with her parents in Dallas and working in the laboratory of Dr. Carol Tamminga, Chair of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center, researching glutamatergic signaling in the hippocampus and anterior cingulate of schizophrenic patients. This was part of UT Southwestern’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program.

“Dr. Meyer is a very unusual medical student,” said Dr. Tamminga, “in her intense focus on excellence and her drive to understand brain function in detail and in its peculiar dysfunctions. She has excelled in her research to understand psychiatric disorders from the cell to the whole brain to the person. 

“She is coming into the field of psychiatry as biological understandings are developing, and we see that her talent will contribute to unanticipated advances in defining psychiatric diseases in her career. This award is a distinct honor, truly deserved and predictive of outstanding future contributions.”

Dr. Meyer says she came to an interest in psychiatry, not just through inheritance, but through a scientific curiosity developed during her seven years in the Tamminga lab, and mentorships from Dr. Meredith Chapman, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, and Dr. David Atkinson, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, who both work in Child and Adolescent psychiatry, and Dr. Adam Brenner, Professor of Psychiatry.

“Caite’s accomplishments in translational neuroscience research and in selection to the Gold Humanism Honor Society are impressive on their own,” Dr. Brenner said. “Together they demonstrate her deep commitment to providing an integrated biopsychosocial approach to patients that will combine great compassion with outstanding intellect.”

The oldest of six children, she saw her brother, Nate, diagnosed early in life with an Autism Spectrum Disorder. Intervention changed his life trajectory for the better. Those many siblings were a blessing, and she still loves being surrounded by children and, by extension, families.

That might point toward a career in child and adolescent psychiatry.

“I hope that I can have the same positive impact on my future patients,” Dr. Meyer said. “The brain is one of the last frontiers of modern medicine. There is so much that we do not yet understand, so much left to be discovered and we are only recently developing the tools to do so. It’s very exciting.”

Of course, she credits her parents as her most important mentors. Her mother, Dr. Christie Little, is a 1985 graduate of UT Southwestern, and her father, Dr. Bruce Meyer, is Executive Vice President for Health System Affairs at UT Southwestern.   

“Not only is he a leader on campus, but also embodies the ideals of a humanistic physician,” said Dr. Meyer of her father. “Whether it be with patients or peers, he has taught me to approach each new person in my life with compassion, respect, and empathy.”

But as she goes on to her residency at Brown University, she will fondly recall the friendships she built during medical school. Having gone to high school in Worcester, Massachusetts, and undergraduate school at Cornell in New York, she readily admits that she came to Dallas with very few local friends.

Her classmates and the UT Southwestern community quickly became extended family. Dr. Meyer recalls the medical school’s freshman retreat, when she leaned against a sap-laden tree. Her “new best friend” and classmate Leonora Slatnick [now Dr. Slatnick] spent the next few hours cleaning the sap out of her tresses with one-inch alcohol wipes. Fortunately, the friendship stuck even better than the sap.

  ###

Dr. Bruce Meyer holds the T.C. Lupton Family Professorship in Patient Care, in Honor of Dr. John Dowling McConnell and Dr. David Andrew Pistenmaa.