Dr. Ida Fonkoue

I thought this is a disease of the military.

Well, that doesn't really connect.

But as I started to learn more about it, I'm like, this is a chronic model of stress.

So regardless of people in the military experiencing it at war, I really want to see what it does to the cardiovascular system.

Fast forward three years after my postdoc at MRA, it was time for me to become an independent faculty.

And I had been listening to the stories of women in the military.

What was striking to me was that the women in the military did not report witnessing war or being in combat.

That's the reason why they were traumatized.

For the men, it was the case.

So we had a questionnaire called combat exposure questionnaire.

Men were called high by women?

No.

And as I started to investigate more, I realized, and we were all aware of this, it's not a secret,

There's a lot of interpersonal abuse that used to happen and hopefully it's a little less now for women in the military.

So there was a lot of abuse between rank and women not being able to express certain things.

So I thought, well, I think I really want to focus on women because whether women are in the military or outside of the military, they share this common interpersonal nature to their traumas.

that's how I ended up where I am today, where I focus on PTSD, but mostly from interpersonal, from an interpersonal cause or origin.

So I hope I was able to like brush, these were nine years that I kind of trying to sum up in a few minutes here.

Hey, we all have our causes.

Yes, thank you.