Cindy Stodola Pomerleau was born in 1943 in Neptune, NJ, a small town on the central Jersey coast. Her family lived there because her father, an expert in radar, was a civilian scientist working for the US Army at Camp Evans in nearby Wall, NJ. His biggest moment of fame came in 1946, when he headed a team that bounced radar waves off the moon for the first time, marking the birth of radioastronomy. When she was 13 her family moved to Northport, NY, a picturesque village on the North Shore of Long Island. After graduating from high school, she attended Smith College, where she majored in English. She spent her year at Barnard and then remained in New York City to pursue a master’s degree in literature at Columbia. There she met and married her husband, also a graduate student at Columbia. After finishing his degree, he accepted a faculty position in Philadelphia where Cindy, now the mother of two small children, completed her PhD in 18th century English literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Her doctoral dissertation was entitled “Resigning the needle for the pen": A Study of Autobiographical Writings of British Women Before 1800. It was uncharted territory at the time, scholarly speaking, and for fifteen minutes she was probably the only person in the world who had even read all these books. Although an excerpt of this document was subsequently published in a book scholarly essays on women’s autobiography, it was otherwise available only via University Microfilms. Nevertheless, over the years, despite its obscurity, she heard from enough people from all over the world to realize that it had developed its own little cult following, probably because it filled an otherwise unoccupied niche. Eventually, she had the text word-processed and that version, along with an updated introduction, can now be downloaded at no charge from the University of Pennsylvania website.
After finishing up at Penn she confronted a flaw in her plan to become a scholar and teacher of English literature - namely, a drastic shortage of positions in her field (created at least in part as an unintended consequence of a Ford Foundation program for predoctoral studies in the humanities launched in the mid-1960s, when a sudden glut of PhDs in English overwhelmed the job pool). In need of a new idea, in 1978 she accepted a job as Director of the Oral History Project on Women Physicians at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. Of the forty-some interviews conducted by the Project, she and her colleagues, Drs. Regina Markell Morantz and Carol Fenichel, selected nine to include in a book entitled In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians. The book was favorably received by critics and has turned out to be a bit of an evergreen. It remained in print for many years, both in hard-cover and paperback, and is still available as an e-book. She knows it has touched the lives of many women and was deeply moved when a young colleague told her the book had inspired her to become a physician.
The Oral History Project was funded by a grant that lasted only two years, but it proved to be a turning point in her life. Working in a medical school library gave her a taste for medical research and led her to enroll in a program run jointly by the University of Hartford and Trinity College (by then her husband was on the faculty of the University of Connecticut, and they were living in West Hartford) to pursue a master’s degree in psychology and neuroscience.
In 1985 her husband was recruited to the University of Michigan. Armed with her shiny new neuroscience degree, she joined him in his research on smoking and nicotine addiction, where she served as Director of the Nicotine Research Laboratory in a professional collaboration that continued for more than two decades, and where she eventually reached the rank of Research Professor in the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry. Much of her own research focused on the impact of smoking on women - including smoking across the menstrual cycle, depression and smoking, and weight gain as a barrier to cessation. She accumulated a bibliography of more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications on smoking and nicotine dependence, including parts of the 2001 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking in Women. She also published a small inspirational volume entitled Life After Cigarettes, intended for weight-concerned women smokers and former smokers.
In 2009 her husband retired and, after a bit of foot-dragging, she decided to do so as well. As an active emerita faculty member, she continued to do some reviewing and finished up a number of papers and projects. She also began sorting through her family photos and documents (dating back to letters between her great grandparents), with the goal of organizing them well enough to ensure that her daughters wouldn't just head for the nearest dumpster when the time came. That task, she figured, could take awhile - maybe even as long as a few weeks. She was a little off in her estimate; being the family archivist and genealogist essentially became her part-time job for the next several years.
Although organizing all those documents and photos remains a receding horizon, she eventually started noticing that her family archivist job had dwindled into something more like a hobby. Once again, it seemed, she was due for a recalibration.
When she was a child, whenever anyone asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always gave the same answer: a writer. Writing is what she did. Even during her years as a graduate student, as a busy wife and mother, and later as a a practicing scientist, she continued to publish books, scientific research papers, humorous essays, and short fiction; to work as a science writer for the Department of Psychiatry; and to churn out volume after volume of memoirs and family stories for her relatives. Now, relatively free of other obligations, she has returned to her roots - writing, and curating some of her earlier writings as well. She also maintain Domesticating the Cigarette, a virtual museum created to showcase her collection of women's smoking artifacts and trace the way in which smoking became incorporated into the daily lives of women.
Her doctoral dissertation was entitled “Resigning the needle for the pen": A Study of Autobiographical Writings of British Women Before 1800. It was uncharted territory at the time, scholarly speaking, and for fifteen minutes she was probably the only person in the world who had even read all these books. Although an excerpt of this document was subsequently published in a book scholarly essays on women’s autobiography, it was otherwise available only via University Microfilms. Nevertheless, over the years, despite its obscurity, she heard from enough people from all over the world to realize that it had developed its own little cult following, probably because it filled an otherwise unoccupied niche. Eventually, she had the text word-processed and that version, along with an updated introduction, can now be downloaded at no charge from the University of Pennsylvania website.
After finishing up at Penn she confronted a flaw in her plan to become a scholar and teacher of English literature - namely, a drastic shortage of positions in her field (created at least in part as an unintended consequence of a Ford Foundation program for predoctoral studies in the humanities launched in the mid-1960s, when a sudden glut of PhDs in English overwhelmed the job pool). In need of a new idea, in 1978 she accepted a job as Director of the Oral History Project on Women Physicians at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. Of the forty-some interviews conducted by the Project, she and her colleagues, Drs. Regina Markell Morantz and Carol Fenichel, selected nine to include in a book entitled In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians. The book was favorably received by critics and has turned out to be a bit of an evergreen. It remained in print for many years, both in hard-cover and paperback, and is still available as an e-book. She knows it has touched the lives of many women and was deeply moved when a young colleague told her the book had inspired her to become a physician.
The Oral History Project was funded by a grant that lasted only two years, but it proved to be a turning point in her life. Working in a medical school library gave her a taste for medical research and led her to enroll in a program run jointly by the University of Hartford and Trinity College (by then her husband was on the faculty of the University of Connecticut, and they were living in West Hartford) to pursue a master’s degree in psychology and neuroscience.
In 1985 her husband was recruited to the University of Michigan. Armed with her shiny new neuroscience degree, she joined him in his research on smoking and nicotine addiction, where she served as Director of the Nicotine Research Laboratory in a professional collaboration that continued for more than two decades, and where she eventually reached the rank of Research Professor in the University of Michigan Department of Psychiatry. Much of her own research focused on the impact of smoking on women - including smoking across the menstrual cycle, depression and smoking, and weight gain as a barrier to cessation. She accumulated a bibliography of more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications on smoking and nicotine dependence, including parts of the 2001 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking in Women. She also published a small inspirational volume entitled Life After Cigarettes, intended for weight-concerned women smokers and former smokers.
In 2009 her husband retired and, after a bit of foot-dragging, she decided to do so as well. As an active emerita faculty member, she continued to do some reviewing and finished up a number of papers and projects. She also began sorting through her family photos and documents (dating back to letters between her great grandparents), with the goal of organizing them well enough to ensure that her daughters wouldn't just head for the nearest dumpster when the time came. That task, she figured, could take awhile - maybe even as long as a few weeks. She was a little off in her estimate; being the family archivist and genealogist essentially became her part-time job for the next several years.
Although organizing all those documents and photos remains a receding horizon, she eventually started noticing that her family archivist job had dwindled into something more like a hobby. Once again, it seemed, she was due for a recalibration.
When she was a child, whenever anyone asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she always gave the same answer: a writer. Writing is what she did. Even during her years as a graduate student, as a busy wife and mother, and later as a a practicing scientist, she continued to publish books, scientific research papers, humorous essays, and short fiction; to work as a science writer for the Department of Psychiatry; and to churn out volume after volume of memoirs and family stories for her relatives. Now, relatively free of other obligations, she has returned to her roots - writing, and curating some of her earlier writings as well. She also maintain Domesticating the Cigarette, a virtual museum created to showcase her collection of women's smoking artifacts and trace the way in which smoking became incorporated into the daily lives of women.