Lee Nelken Robins, Ph.D., professor emeritus of social science in psychiatry at the School of Medicine, died at her home Sept. 25, 2009, following a long battle against cancer. She was 87.
Lee Robins
Robins was a world leader in psychiatric epidemiology research and had worked in the Department of Psychiatry for more than 50 years.
“Washington University has lost a dear friend with the passing of Lee Robins,” Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton said. “She was a distinguished member of the faculty on both the Danforth and Medical campuses, and her important work contributed to our understanding of how children grow and develop. Professor Robins will be missed.”
Born Aug. 29, 1922, in New Orleans, Robins earned a doctoral degree from Harvard University/Radcliffe College in 1951. She joined the faculty at WUSTL in 1954 as a research assistant in psychiatry and rose to full professor in 1968. She is the founder and former director of the Master’s Program in Psychiatric Epidemiology.
On the Danforth Campus, she also was a lecturer and an adjunct associate professor of sociology from 1957-1963 and professor of sociology from 1969-1991. She also was a professor in the Program for Social Thought and Analysis from 1991 until her retirement in 2001.
Her early research made key observations about how psychiatric disorders early in life can affect adults, revealing that antisocial behavior in childhood is a major predictor of later psychiatric problems. Those studies forced mental health professionals to rethink topics from teen suicide to drug abuse. Her first major study became the book “Deviant Children Grown Up,” published in 1966.
Charles F. Zorumski, M.D., the Samuel B. Guze Professor and head of the Department of Psychiatry, said Robins was one of the important creators of tools that can measure the prevalence of psychiatric illness in the general population.
“Lee Robins was truly one of the leaders in psychiatric epidemiology,” Zorumski said. “She was one of the field’s great pioneers in developing methods to measure and assess psychiatric illness in various populations. Her accomplishments allowed Lee to enrich both our department and the entire field of psychiatry. Those in Lee’s family and we in her extended Washington University family already miss her wisdom and good humor.”
Over the years, continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health, Robins gathered data on Vietnam veterans, disaster survivors and others. She wrote the Diagnostic Interview Schedule and was one of the principal investigators for the landmark Epidemiologic Catchment Area study in the 1980s.
With her husband, Eli Robins, she raised four sons, and they had eight grandchildren. Eli passed away in 1994. In 1998, Lee Robins married Hugh Chaplin Jr., an emeritus professor in the departments of Medicine and of Pathology and the former head of the Irene Walter Johnson Institute of Rehabilitation.
A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Study of Addiction to Alcohol and Other Drugs, she was a member of the Institute of Medicine.
She won numerous awards, and, in 2005, she was honorary grand marshal at the University’s Commencement.
In addition to Chaplin, she is survived by her sons Paul of Redwood City, Calif.; Jamie of Cambridge, Mass.; Tom and his wife, Bonnie Kay, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; and Nick and his wife, Tracy Freedman, of San Francisco; eight grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
There will be a memorial service held at Graham Chapel at a later date. Memorial contributions may be made to the Lee Robins Lectureship in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, 660 S. Euclid Ave., Box 8134, St. Louis, MO 63110.