Fortunate Fall?

A Career Path: From Musician
to Catastrophe to Psychology

Boston drivers have a bad reputation, and Neils Waller, ALM '89, is proof. In the late 1970s, Waller, a classical and jazz guitarist with a Bachelor of Music from the New England Conservatory of Music, was catapulted from his bike, when a driver ran him off the road, slamming his wrists into the trolley tracks. The result was permanent nerve damage in his left-hand pinky, a catastrophe for this classical musician.

Neil Waller, ALM '89

For the next two years, Waller traveled the country visiting hand surgeons and physical therapists. Seeing little improvement, he realized that he would need a new profession. Although he had acquired an extensive knowledge of Renaissance lute music, Waller's training at the conservatory had left him with few job-related skills. (As an undergraduate, Waller took only music classes except for the three English classes needed to obtain a bachelor's degree.)

Luckily, psychology has few prerequisites, an ironic fact that enabled Waller to enroll in a graduate-level psycholinguistics course at the Harvard Extension School. Other psychology courses soon followed, and he eventually enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts Program with a psychology concentration. Waller's professors included David Buss, George Goethals, and Brendan Maher. Their efforts turned this ex-classical guitarist into a budding psychologist.

Brendan Maher introduced Waller to research. His first publication, which explored the information processing capabilities of schizophrenic patients, was co-authored with Maher and a Harvard psychiatrist, Theo Manschreck. Manschreck furthered Waller's commitment to psychology when he hired Waller (with only a music degree) for a psychologist position at the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center, which is affiliated with Harvard Medical school. Through this affiliation, Waller joined the first-year psychiatry residents in a year-long training program. These seminars were taught by hard-nosed psychiatrists who instilled in their students a deep appreciation for research-based clinical practice. When Waller was accepted into PhD programs at Harvard and the University of Minnesota, he was faced with a difficult choice. That choice was made easier when George Goethals convinced him to attend Minnesota.

Waller's first statistics class, and a half dozen additional classes, were part of Minnesota's internationally acclaimed statistics department. Although statistics lacks the emotional subtlety of music, the patterning of information that is elucidated in a convincing quantitative analysis reminded Waller of a satisfying musical score. Perhaps because of his musical background, Waller took as many statistics (and psychometrics) courses as courses in clinical psychology. He graduated with a PhD in quantitative psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1990, and is now Professor of Quantitative Psychology at Vanderbilt University.

The leitmotif of Waller's current work is the application of quantitative methods to current psychological concerns. His quantitative skills have allowed him to explore the behavior genetics of religiosity (with reared-apart twins) and romantic love styles (with his own California Twin Registry), neural network models of classification, computerized adaptive testing, and cross-cultural models of personality structure.

Psychological phenomena drive his quantitative methods; not the other way around. Waller's ability to combine quantitative rigor with psychological substance earned him the 1997 Cattell Award for Multivariate Experimental Research from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology and the 1997 Morton Prince Award from the International Society for the Study of Dissociation. This year he received the Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the American Psychological Association. Waller finds the current renaissance in quantitative psychology to be both intellectually invigorating and long overdue.