Dr. Gayle Beck, Department of Psychology

May Spotlight

As an undergraduate at Brown University, Dr. J. Gayle Beck thought that eventually she would be a brain surgeon.

“Who knows where that came from,” she says now. “I had this foolish idea that there was some linkage between what brain surgery did and behavior.”

Beck has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis since 2008. She is planning to retire later this year.  

It wasn’t until Beck got a job working as a research tech at a medical school that the light went on for her future work. “I was working on a research project with some people who had schizophrenia … it was, like, this is unbelievable. Science really appealed to me and working with mental health problems appealed to me. Suddenly, I had a focus.”

As a doctoral student at the State University of New York at Albany, she worked with a professional psychologist who had been at a medical school, so she learned about setting up a lab and establishing relationships in the community.

“I just got completely enamored with doing research, though in the early days of my career, my research was very theoretical,” said Beck. “That sense of intellectual play was really fun.”

Something useful?

Her grandmother, who became a university economics professor late in life, asked her once: When do you get to research something useful?

Fortunately, “when you’re in a clinical psychology training program, you also learn how to do therapy,” said Beck. “You learn how to do assessments.” When she headed off to Rutgers Medical School for an internship year, then took her first faculty job at the University of Houston, she began to get more useful, according to her grandmother’s measurement.

“I have always thought my work was going to be much more relevant if I recruited help-seeking populations,” she said. “So, I’ve always had a sort of bridge between the mental health practice community and my research. As I matured a little bit more, I started doing studies that involved treatment in one form or another.”

She began doing work involving sexual dysfunction, then moved into research of different kinds of anxiety problems. Then, a team of three “marvelous, strong, bright” women graduate students approached Beck looking for an engaging new project. “That was my first toe in the water in the trauma area – we were working with people who had been in serious motor vehicle accidents.”

She’d become a trauma researcher, the field that would define the rest of her distinguished career (see box).

A trauma researcher comes to Memphis

“Most of my work has viewed trauma through a broader mental health lens,” she continues. “That means we do focus on PTSD, but we also focus on other anxiety problems. We focus on depression. We focus on psychological phenomena that may explain why all those bad feelings reverberate for some people after trauma.”

In 2008, Beck, then at the University of Buffalo in New York, heard from a friend that the Chair of Excellence position at the University of Memphis was open. 

“I started looking at what goes on in Memphis,” she said, knowing she was ready to take on a more challenging trauma population. “After I interviewed here, I started reading a lot about women who’d experienced intimate partner violence – DV (domestic violence) rates in Memphis are astronomically high. So, I thought: If you’re going to do this kind of work, you need to be in a community that needs you, right? 

“The combination of the financial support, the fact that the university really valued engaged scholarship, and the fact that Memphis has a big DV problem” decided her next step, she said. 

It was a bit of a culture shock, moving to Memphis from Buffalo. For one thing, Beck is one of only two female Chairs of Excellence at the university; the other is Beverly Cross, who holds the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Urban Education. When Beck is introduced and her husband is present, people often assume that he is the professor. 

But Beck also found Memphis diverse and accessible, as long as she was willing to take the first steps. “I have met a really broad array of people across many different sectors – it’s been marvelous. That’s where not being from here is an asset … I don’t have any preconceived stereotypes.” 

The Athena Project

Her work at Memphis has culminated in the Athena Project, a research center for women who have experienced intimate partner violence. 

When a woman calls the Athena Project, “we start with a really thorough mental health assessment, because the aftermath of intimate partner violence is a little different for each person. We have a treatment arm where we provide treatment for PTSD; the assessment helps us to know if that’s a good match. If it is, we offer it to the women for free.”

Beck has also gathered information on various mental health resources in the community, which she seeks out “like a small terrier,” always looking for the best fit for the women she is working with.

“Along the way, it became a passion,” she said. 

Beck’s work with victims of trauma eventually moved along to working with veterans through the VA, where she helped devise an evidence-based practice to use in group therapy for PTSD. 

She has also begun to develop some papers using a data set collected at the beginning of the pandemic on nurses in Massachusetts, documenting what is going on with their mental health. 

Making people’s lives better

“Along the way, opportunities just keep coming up,” she said. “I guess I just find research exciting – what kinds of questions can we ask that would make people’s lives better?”

But it is clear that the Athena Project has captured her heart. “I’ve just adored running that project,” she said. “It’s been fun to be able to take all the parts of things that I was trained in and put them together, then watch the graduate students really catch …

“They catch in terms of their research work and their clinical skills and writing, and go on and do really cool things.” Setting her students on their path is what she is most proud of in her long career. 

That, and developing resources to share with women in the community who need them most. 

“Here’s a little secret: There’s an extraordinary network of agencies in this community,” she said. “Unfortunately, there’s no interstitial tissue between them. So, for 14 years, I have been ferreting out who can do a good psychiatric evaluation for somebody who has no money and has never filed for TennCare, or who can do a really good evaluation for a very affluent woman whose husband tried to drown her in the tub.”

How does she overcome what might be a woman’s reluctance to ask for help?

Says Beck, wryly: “Almost nobody wants to talk about it -- until they find out what you do when you’re a psychologist.”