Nina Pierpont, M.D., Ph.D.

I am a New Englander by many generations. I grew up in Connecticut, in a family of teachers and writers. My grandfather, like me, was a doctor and ecologist. After being blessed by a fine elementary school (New Canaan Country School, 1970) and high school (Milton Academy, 1973), I thumbed my nose at the family tradition of Harvard and attended Yale on a National Merit Scholarship. There my weakness with procrastination got the better of me and I became skilled at turning in term papers late, for which I graduated a point shy of magna cum laude (1977). I earned a Ph.D. (1985) in behavioral ecology at Princeton (which training, incidentally, I use substantially in my work in behavioral pediatrics), did a post-doctoral fellowship in ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History (NYC) and, as an over-the-hill woman of thirty-two, went to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where I earned the M.D. degree (1991). I wanted to give my ecology training a human face. I chose pediatrics and completed internship at the Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, D.C., and residency at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, Lebanon, NH (because my husband detested Washington).

Despite his feelings toward Washington, D.C., and his name (Calvin Luther Martin), my husband is a respectable man (retired Rutgers University professor and author). Our two children (my stepchildren) are grown and have made us grandparents. I am 54 years old. (Yikes!)

I am an unabashed lover of wildness. I did my Ph.D. research living in a tent in the Amazon jungle for several years, studying bird behavior. In pursuit of wildness and native cultures, my husband and I lived for another several years with Yup’ik Eskimos on the Alaska tundra, near the Bering Sea (where I became chief of pediatrics at a native-run hospital). Likewise we spent a summer living on the Navajo reservation (as I did a sub-internship in medical school).

For three years I ran a general pediatrics practice in Malone, Franklin County, NY (poorest county in the state), where I was, as well, the pediatrician for the St. Regis Mohawk Nation (Hogansburg, NY). For the next three years (2000-03) I was Senior Attending in Pediatrics at Bassett Healthcare, Cooperstown, NY (and, must confess, never darkened the door of the Baseball Hall of Fame). Bassett is a teaching hospital of Columbia University and I was Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia’s College of Physicians & Surgeons.