Barbara Geller, MD, was born on April 21,1939 and passed away on May 8, 2020 in St. Louis, Missouri at the age of 81 after a brief illness. Dr. Geller joined the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry in 1991 as a professor of child psychiatry and became professor emerita in 2009. Prior to arrival at WUSM she had appointments at New York University-Bellevue Medical Center, the University of Rochester Medical Center, Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of South Carolina School of Medicine in Columbia, S.C.

Dr. Geller earned a bachelor’s degree in 1960 from Barnard College at Columbia University and a medical degree in 1964 from Albert Einstein College of Medicine, both in New York City. She completed a residency in psychiatry and a fellowship in child and adolescent psychiatry at New York University-Bellevue Medical Center. Her pursuit of medicine and psychiatry was entirely self-directed as she was the first physician in her family. When she chose to retire in 2009, she was at the height of her academic career.

From the time of her arrival in 1991, she was one of the department’s leading investigators, educators and clinicians, and she was internationally recognized for her research on childhood bipolar disorders. She was the recipient of the first National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grant award to study mania in childhood, the “Phenomenology and Course of Pediatric Bipolar Disorders” study.

During her long and productive career, she was principal investigator on extensive National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)- and National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)-funded research, including pioneering studies on clinical identification, longitudinal follow-up, family psychopathology and pharmacological treatment of manic and depressive disorders in children age six or older. Dr. Geller was lead investigator on the national NIMH-funded, multisite project “Treatment of Early Age Mania (TEAM),” the first large-scale, federally funded pharmacological treatment study of childhood mania.

She pioneered pharmacokinetic studies of antidepressants in children and adolescents as well as pharmacological studies of lithium for child bipolar depression. More than 100 researchers from numerous universities worldwide came to Dr. Geller’s laboratory to train in research methods for diagnosing mania in childhood and to learn her adapted version of a child psychiatric interview with an extensive mania module (WASH U K-SADS).

Dr. Geller served on or chaired more than 55 federal advisory committees at NIMH, NIDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and she published more than 130 articles on childhood manic-depressive disorders. She served on multiple editorial boards, including the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the NIMH Psychopharmacology Bulletin, and Biological Psychiatry. In her retirement she remained active in the field writing editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine’s “Journal Watch” for Psychiatry until 2019. She also wrote fiction under a pseudonym.

Her philanthropic work included serving on the board of directors and as chair of the Professional Advisory Board of the Child & Adolescent Bipolar Foundation. She served on the scientific advisory board of the National Depression and Manic-Depression Association and on the scientific advisory council of the National Association for Mental Illness.

Among her major awards were the Nathan Cummings Special Research Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and Outstanding Scientist Award from the Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Metropolitan St. Louis. Dr. Geller was a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. Based on her years of accomplishments at WUSM, she was chosen as the honorary “Grand Marshall” in the commencement for Washington University in 2011.

She was widely respected as an innovator in child mental health research and a very careful methodologist. She was a fiercely independent woman and strong minded thinker who achieved great academic success long before women had a significant foothold in science. Her discoveries will impact the lives of children for decades to come.