Victor Reus M.D.

Email: Victor.Reus@ucsf.edu

Position: Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, UCSF School of Medicine

College and Class Year: College of Arts and Sciences, 1969

Tell us about what you're doing with your life, including what brought you to the Bay Area.

I came to San Francisco in 1978 for my first academic position, following a fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The plan was to return East—where I had grown up—after a few years in California. That never happened. I fell in love with the social and physical landscape of the Bay Area and never looked back. Over the course of a long academic career at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), I was fortunate to engage nationally through various organizational roles. Though now retired, I remain on recall and actively involved in several extramural grants, including research on the genetics of serious mental illness in Colombia, biomarkers of depression and antidepressant response, and the metabolomics of PTSD. I continue to serve as Chair of the UCSF Institutional Review Board (IRB) on the Parnassus campus and lead a Practice Guideline Writing Committee for the American Psychiatric Association. I spent many years living in San Francisco, with a weekend home in Glen Ellen. These days, Glen Ellen has become my primary residence, with occasional forays into the City.

In what ways have you stayed connected with Cornell since graduating?

I have stayed connected to Cornell primarily through the enduring friendships I formed during my time there—some of my closest relationships trace back to those days. I also enjoy discovering new friendships sparked by shared Cornell roots. Reunions are always a highlight, offering a chance to reconnect and reflect. I also keep in touch through newsletters from both Cornell and Delta Phi, which help me stay in the loop and feel part of the community no matter where I am.

If you could go back to your years on the Hill - what one piece of advice would you share with that younger version of you?

If I could go back, I’d tell my younger self: never skip a class, and take as many as possible. Every course is a doorway to something new—an idea, a passion, a perspective—and the missed opportunities are far more valuable than you realize at the time.

What was the most important class, club or connection made while at Cornell that has been important in your career (or life) journey?

That's a difficult choice, but if I had to choose one, it would be the Honors Psychology Seminar led by Ulric Neisser. He was an extraordinarily brilliant, warm, and stimulating scholar and teacher—truly a prince of a man. I still remember how he encouraged me to write up a conversation we had about the ontogeny and phylogeny of sleep, and how those ideas could deepen our understanding of complex behavior. His mentorship left a lasting imprint on both my academic path and the way I think about the world.