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Allison DOUPE Obituary



ALLISON DOUPE MD,PhD
Our beloved brilliant daughter Allison died at her home in San Francisco on October 24, 2014, of cancer. This obituary is to finally inform our friends, family, neighbours, especially in Canada, who may have missed the tide of tributes to Allison's greatness in the neuroscience world.

Allison was for more than two decades in the University of California San Francisco's departments of Psychiatry and Physiology, and neuroscience, an outstanding neurobiologist (her Harvard PhD) and a deeply sensitive practising psychiatrist (her Harvard MD and UCLA specialization). These two grand regions of biology, of brain and mind, have striven increasingly for unity in the modern era, and Allison's life work was an important part in that effort.

Allison's and her students' revealing of the neural basis of songbirds' song learning, and its very close similarity to language learning in humans, has become a central model for understanding this key process in species who learn and need to practise to do so.

All who know Allison have remarked her unquenchable intellect, and yet her still nurturing and caring leading of her juniors and fellows. And her strong encouragement of women in science.

Her natural kindness warmed and embraced all of us who shared and observed the cut-too-short life which we ran beside and certainly behind her. The same is true of her not-behind (she always said 'ahead') husband and fellow UCSF neuroscientist Michael Brainard. And their age-ten twin sons Sam and Alec. All have had Allison's best years as their intellectual and spiritual best example.

To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.

Published by The Globe and Mail on Jan. 17, 2015.

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