Look Who it Was Random video

Don't Let Them Stop You | Julia Chase-Brand | TEDxManchesterHighSchool

530 views · Published 28 June 2018 · 12:48 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: TEDx Talks · 2018 · Nonprofits & Activism

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Julia Chase-Brand offers advice for navigating social limits as she describes her experiences in breaking boundaries throughout her life including her famous act of civil disobedience in running the Manchester Road Race at a time when women were not allowed to participate. Julia Chase-Brand, MD, PhD was a pioneer in American women’s athletics. Since 1928, women were banned from all distance running. In 1961, Julia chose to directly challenge the AAU rules by running the Manchester Road Race and within  months, the AAU backed down and sanctioned the first women’s cross-country runs.

 

Julia graduated from Smith College and earned a PhD in Physiology at Indiana University, in a department that hadn’t granted a woman a PhD for the previous 20 years. Her field-work, done in the mountains of Trinidad, demonstrated that bats are not blind. Later publications were on the similarities between facial expressions in young gorillas and human children, behavior of migrating shorebirds, and rat sonar.

 

Then at 49, she walked away from her tenured Biology position at Barnard College, entered Albert Einstein School of Medicine, and became a Psychiatrist and their oldest medical graduate.  Barriers confronted, and barriers finessed. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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