Isabelle Rapin

Isabelle Rapin, M.D., is a professor emerita in both the Saul R. Korey Department of Neurology and the Department of Pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. She retired in 2012, at the age of 84. The New York Times said: "Considered by many the doyenne of autism, Dr. Rapin has spent decades studying the disability."The Boston Globe described her as a "leading authority on autism". She is a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology (FAAN).

Rapin was born in Lausanne, Switzerland; her mother was from Connecticut, and her father was Swiss. As a child, she was an avid reader, and a Girl Scout who attended all-girls' schools between the ages of 9 and 19. Surrounded by a family of scientists, before she was ten years old, she had decided to become a physician.

She started the University of Lausanne Medical School in 1946, in a class of around 100 students that included about a dozen women. She decided to become a pediatric neurologist in 1951 after she spent twelve weeks at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital and at the Hôpital des Enfants Malades in Paris. When she graduated from Lausanne Medical School in 1952, there were few paying jobs in Switzerland, so she applied to the United States to Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and Bellevue Hospital; she received a reply only from Bellevue, and was offered a position in pediatrics, to begin in July 1953. In 1952, she received a Swiss Federal Diploma in Medicine; she received her MD in 1955, when her thesis was published in the Swiss Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry.

She met her husband, Harold Oaklander, in August 1958, and they were married in the spring of 1959. Of her husband, she said: "Without his unselfish and sustained encouragement and help, his willingness to share in all household and child-rearing jobs (except for car maintenance, his, and sewing, mine), I could never have flourished in child neurology as I did." Her husband finished his PhD at Columbia University, but knew she would not leave the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, so he accepted a "less prestigious" job nearby. They had four children: two daughters and two sons.

Rapin interned in pediatrics at New York City's Bellevue Hospital and did her residency in neurology at the Neurological Institute at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, where she also completed a year of fellowship. She joined the Albert Einstein College of Medicine faculty in 1958 and retired at the age of 84 in 2012. Of the developments in the field of autism during those years, Rapin said, "Especially in the days before autism was all over the Internet and print media, parents who came for advice were most likely to report problems with language ... These days, Internet-savvy parents worry about autism but do not always tell me their concerns when they visit my office, because they want to hear my independent diagnosis."

...
Wikipedia