Academic Career
Persaud was educated at the Haberdashers' Aske's School (an independent school in Elstree, just north of London) and at University College London, where he read for his degrees in medicine and psychology. His first year at UCL was marred by failure after he was forced to re-sit the examinations in anatomy, which he attributed later to availing himself too freely of the other educational opportunities there. He told the British Medical Journal that this left him “traumatised,” and he compensated by virtually taking up residence in the college library and eventually achieving at least three degrees, four diplomas and a membership examination:
BSc (Hons) London 1983 (1st Class Honours in Psychology: an intercalated degree)
MB BS London 1986
DHMSA 1988 (Diploma in History of Medicine, Society of Apothecaries)
Dip Phil 1990 (Poss. University of London External System: equivalent to 1st year of BA)
MRCPsych 1990 (Member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists)
MPhil London 1991 (Prob. in psychiatry, through the Institute of Psychiatry)
Diploma in Health Economics 1994
MSc 1995 City University London (Statistics)
He was a psychiatric trainee at the Bethlem Royal Hospital and Maudsley Hospital in London, a research scholar and post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Hospital in the USA in 1990 and a research worker at the Institute of Neurology of UCL. In 2000 he was awarded a UCL Fellowship, and in 2005 made a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Apothecaries.
Persaud resigned from his position as consultant psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust in October 2008, following a 3-month suspension by the General Medical Council for dishonesty. He is a Senior Lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of London and has a Visiting Professor role as Gresham Professor for Public Understanding of Psychiatry. In 2002 he was voted one of the top ten psychiatrists in the UK by a survey of the Institute of Psychiatry and the Royal College of Psychiatrists, published in the Independent on Sunday newspaper.
Read more about this topic: Raj Persaud
Famous quotes containing the words academic and/or career:
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
—Ruth Behar (b. 1956)