When I left Montreal to do my post-doctoral training in Pittsburgh, my main goal was to learn how to use the various neuroimaging methods so I could study sleep in people with post-traumatic stress syndrome. I've been doing the same thing for a long time. For 20 years now, I've been studying sleep in people who have nightmares, who have post-traumatic stress syndrome. I was trained in neurology, and I was familiar with various methodologies, but Pittsburgh gave me the opportunity to learn to use neuroimaging. Those types of studies enabled me to answer the research questions I was asking and to improve my clinical practice in sleep medicine.
I had to return to Montreal. I left thinking that I was going to return to Montreal and bring back this expertise and do the studies here. My training was demanding and took longer than I initially thought.
It also has to do with when I left. I left in 2001, which was when NATO operations in Afghanistan started. Then in 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. At the time, there were various possible grant sources for research related to post-traumatic stress syndrome and sleep, which was not very popular up until 2001. I applied for grants and had access to a fairly large research program that developed very quickly. That's what kept me in Pittsburgh.