Jamison began her study of clinical psychology at University of California, Los Angeles in the late 1960s, receiving both B.A. and M.A. degrees in 1971. She continued on at UCLA, receiving a C.Phil. in 1973 and a PhD in 1975, and became a faculty member at the university. She went on to found and direct the school's Affective Disorders Clinic, a large teaching and research facility for outpatient treatment. She also studied zoology and neurophysiology as an undergraduate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
After several years as a tenured professor at UCLA, Jamison was offered a position as Assistant Professor and then Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Jamison has given visiting lectures at a number of different institutions while maintaining her professorship at Hopkins. She was distinguished lecturer at Harvard University in 2002 and the Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2003. She was Honorary President and board member of the Canadian Psychological Association from 2009 to 2010. In 2010, she was a panelist in the series of discussions on the latest research into the brain, hosted by Charlie Rose with series scientist Eric Kandel on PBS.[1]
