Beatrix Hamburg

Beatrix Ann Hamburg (née McCleary; October 19, 1923 – April 15, 2018) was an American psychiatrist whose career in academic medicine advanced the field of child and adolescent psychiatry. Hamburg was the first known African-American to attend Vassar College, and was also the first African-American woman to attend Yale Medical School. Hamburg held professorships at Stanford, Harvard, Mt. Sinai and Weill Cornell Medical College. She was on the President's Commission on Mental Health under President Jimmy Carter. Hamburg was a president of the William T. Grant Foundation, and also directed the child psychiatry divisions at Stanford University and Mount Sinai. She originally was going to go into pediatric medicine, but instead found herself interested in psychiatry. She was a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received a Foremother Award for her lifetime of accomplishments from the National Research Center for Women & Families in 2012.

Early life Beatrix Ann McCleary was born to Minor McCleary and Beatrix Ann Downs on October 19, 1923, in Jacksonville, Florida. Her father was a surgeon who died when she was young. Shortly after his death, they moved to Long Island in New York, to be with her maternal grandparents. There, she was raised by her widowed mother and her grandparents. Her mother was a school teacher and a social worker while her grandfather was a Methodist minister and her grandmother was a homemaker. while in October 2015, the couple received the Pardes Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation in recognition of their contributions to the understanding of mental health.

Publications

Personal life Hamburg met her future husband David, an academic physician who has done mental health research, when they were both students at Yale University in 1948. The two married in 1951, and had two children: Eric, a filmmaker, and Margaret, a physician who served as Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President Barack Obama.

Hamburg died as a result of Alzheimer's disease at her daughter's home on April 15, 2018, at the age of 94.