From Academia to Industry: Making Eating Disorder Treatment Accessible
I remember the moment I realized I wanted to become a professor. I worked in a research lab as an undergraduate, checking off the boxes I thought were necessary to go to graduate school where I would become a psychologist trained to treat eating disorders. But it occurred to me that if I focused exclusively on providing treatment for eating disorders, I wouldn’t really know what treatment to use. What was the most effective method for treating eating disorders? The question weighed on me because existing treatments resulted in remission in only about one-third of patients. We needed better research.
To truly have an impact on patients and families with eating disorders, I needed to take a career path that focused on improving eating disorder treatment through research, and an academic career seemed to fit the bill. I stayed on this academic path for 17 years from graduate student, to trainee, to faculty at Stanford University. Now, I find myself reorienting to a new path to best help patients and families with eating disorders.
As of the end of March, I will be vice president of clinical programs at Equip, a one-year-old start-up that recently closed Series A funding and holds tremendous promise in increasing how many people with eating disorders access treatment.
In academia we spend years awaiting the results of a tightly controlled study, while the general public receives subpar care via a variety of programs without research support.
There are myriad reasons for this decision. First, academia can be slow for solving problems. In academia, we spend years awaiting the results of a tightly controlled study, while the general public receives subpar care via a variety of programs without research support. The typical grant from the National Institutes of Health takes over a year to get funded, then three to five years to collect the data, and another five to ten to get results to the public in a meaningful way. At the same time, new start-ups are launching every day offering digital interventions for mental health or teletherapy with little to no research evidence. These companies are offering programming or treatments that feel good, but won’t actually solve problems. And they aren’t always built in a way that prioritizes outcome data.
Second, the pandemic led to a lot of self-reflection, and one thing I’ve realized is that impact matters to me much more than the academic currency of publications and grants. Impact was what brought me to academia in the first place, but it has become increasingly clear that for me it’s not the place I can have the most impact. In the midst of this self-reflection, I feel so lucky to have crossed paths with Equip. Their mission is to provide eating disorder treatment that works, not just treatment that feels good, and they are data-driven by design — delivering family-based treatment (FBT), the treatment with the strongest outcomes in controlled trials, and evaluating ways to improve it. They prioritize providing accessible and affordable care to anyone who needs it. Another thing that business does better than academia is scale — if a treatment works in a controlled trial, but is only accessible by a small percentage of people who need it, is the treatment really worthwhile? I love the challenge of implementing a treatment that not only works, but can also scale in a way to meet the large demand.
Impact was what brought me to academia in the first place, but it has become increasingly clear that for me it’s not the place I can have the most impact.
Lastly, I will get to continue all the exciting parts of my academic job — designing innovations to treatment approaches and evaluating outcomes to measure success, developing and implementing training protocols to allow for treatments to be implemented at scale without sacrificing quality, and branching into the use of technology to enhance human-delivered interventions. These are all the things I would want to do in the academic world, but at a much faster pace to meet the more immediate needs of patients and families. I know it’s not perfect in industry — research isn’t as “clean” and controlled and there are other funding pressures different from the grant funding grind — and I understand the limitations in that. But the benefit of seeing the translation into real-world impact is powerful to me.
That is not to say this was an easy decision. Since that realization as an undergraduate, I have been someone who felt destined for academic life. Stanford has been an amazing place to work, and I loved working with my colleagues there. I have also learned a tremendous amount from some of the world’s greatest experts in eating disorders. I am excited to share that knowledge with the world through Equip — to bring my years of experience studying and treating eating disorders to a company that will truly change the treatment landscape for the better.
