Francine Cournos
Francine Cournos (born June 29, 1945) is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry (in Epidemiology) at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Cournos is also Principal Investigator of the Northeast Caribbean AIDS Education and Training Center at the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies. Early life Cournos was born on June 29, 1945, in New York City to Alexander and Muriel Cournos. Her father Alexander () worked as a copyeditor for The New York Times. Cournos's father, grandfather, and mother died during her childhood. Her mother did not talk to Cournos and her siblings about the progression of her breast cancer, so her death shocked the children. After her mother's death, when Cournos was eleven years old, Cournos and her sister were sent to live with their grandmother. At thirteen years old, her family placed her into foster care with a family in Long Island, New York. Cournos said that being sent to foster care as harder to take than her parents' deaths and she felt that it was "just the act of being up-rooted from everything familiar." She recalls: "As a kid you're not only attached to your parents, you're attached to a million things your neighborhood, your