Nancy Rappaport

assistant professor, psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Nancy Rappaport, MD is an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She is a board certified child and adolescent psychiatrist; her research, teaching and clinical expertise focus on the collaboration between education and psychiatry. She has designed numerous courses for teachers on psychopharmacology, adolescent development, and instructional strategies for disruptive students. Dr. Rappaport has been an attending child and adolescent psychiatrist for the Cambridge, Massachusetts public schools for more than 18 years. When Dr. Rappaport was just four years old and the youngest of six children, she lost her mother to suicide. Years later, she investigated her mother's life and the mysteries surrounding her death, looking at the past as a way to fortify herself for the future. The culmination of this effort is a powerful new memoir, *In Her Wake: A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother's Suicide* (Basic Books, 2009). In it, Dr. Rappaport gives voice to the silent grief that often accompanies painful loss and charts her healing as a mother, doctor and daughter. She offers her own story as a tribute to the endurance of the human spirit, and shows how love lasts longer than death.