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Lee Limbird: "Always thirty seconds away from a changed life"

The phone has been persistently ringing in the office of the Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research at Vanderbilt Medical Center. Finally, Lee Limbird rushes in to take the pre-arranged call—a Department Chair at the Medical Center has been attempting to speak with her about the allocation of lab space. "Hi—I had to pee and they locked the restrooms on this floor," she explains, as if apologizing to a close friend. And then, without pausing, "How can I help?"

This first encounter with Limbird is at odds with the staid, professional image that might be construed from a look through her ponderous CV: Phi Beta Kappa as an undergraduate; completion of her PhD in less than three years; authorship on over 130 peer-reviewed papers; three years as Chair of the NIH study section on pharmacology; numerous awards, grants, and honors; and multiple editorial assignments, including two stints as Editor-in-Chief (along with Joel Hardman) of Goodman and Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics. Prior to overseeing the research initiatives of Vanderbilt Medical School, she had been Chair of the Department of Pharmacology.

But in talking with Lee Limbird, her route to the position of Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research at one of the country's leading medical centers appears to have been neither fueled by professional ambition nor even vaguely calculated. Sure, she is enthusiastic about the intellectual challenges—the "fun"—of biomedical research. But her unrestrained approach to science and scientists seems to stem foremost from an egalitarian sense for the difficulties, privileges, and obligations faced by all members and spheres of society. (She has driven the bus that carries detained Nashville youth on field trips, and she has spent nights, along with her own children, in Nashville homeless shelters and in the Mayan villages of Guatemala.) She mentors her students not only in the dynamics of receptor biology (and biologists), but also in the difficulties of balancing one's goals and commitments.