When Wendy Marie Ingram, Ph.D. ’15, stepped to a podium in Japan to accept a public service and advocacy honor, she opened with a line that has become a compass for her work: “action is my coping mechanism.” It was not an applause line. It is a principle. The losses she witnessed in graduate school were not abstractions. They were classmates, mentors, trainees. The recognition she was receiving, she said, “was not for me. It was for the… all the people we’re doing it for, and because of.” The moment gave her “a lot of energy to keep going.”
This conversation traces how that conviction took root at UC Berkeley, grew through grief and organizing, and matured into a model that makes care a shared practice rather than a private burden.
A purpose shaped by loss
Ingram describes those years at Berkeley with clarity. She recalls the size of the Molecular and Cell Biology program. Her cohort had fifty-six students. The cohort below had twenty-nine. In one academic year, that community lost a classmate named Paul. In that same year, they also lost a faculty member, a postdoc, and an undergraduate to suicide. The pattern sharpened her sense of responsibility. What she felt first was urgency. Do something for those you can help.
Her language refuses euphemism. She names mental illness and suicide in academia. She names the people who do the research and the teaching as people whose lives matter. “Their lives mean something,” she says. The work to improve mental health among academics worldwide “is worth something to more than just… me, or the people who are the loss survivors. It’s bigger than that.”
From questions to action
Ingram is candid about the gap she encountered when she first looked up for answers. She went to people she admired and asked what to do. Many did not know. That lack of answers did not end the conversation. It redirected it. “It’s not a someone should do something,” she remembers. “It’s an okay, I have to do something. Who’s with me?”
The first “with me” was a student group she helped found with classmates. They were peers trying to hold one another through shock and confusion. They were also peers looking for tools. That duality, care and craft, has remained a hallmark of her practice.
Naming the work, honoring a friend
The name Dragonfly carries a story. It honors her classmate and friend, Chris Alvaro who was lost to suicide. Ingram describes attending a memorial for Chris on campus. A large lecture hall was full. Students, colleagues, friends, and admirers gathered to trace a life that radiated mentorship, advocacy, and creative courage. The crowd itself was evidence. Chris had changed people. Naming the organization in Chris’s honor was not only remembrance. It was a promise to do the work in ways that could honor a person like that and support those like them.
A lived experience that reshaped design
Ingram speaks about her own diagnosis with the same directness she brings to institutional change. She distinguishes between common conditions like depression and anxiety and severe mental illnesses like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She notes the grim statistics attached to the latter, and then she tells the truth of her life. Her lived experience with her own bipolar disorder did not match the dire pattern often assumed for bipolar disorder.
She names what has supported her: strong friendships, deep family loyalty, a successful marriage, two children, financial stability, and no hospitalizations or forced medical interventions. She does not generalize from her case, and she does not deny risk. She names factors that might have helped, luck, biology, privilege, faith, and then returns to the design question. If clinicians can miss bipolar disorder, if language can mislead, then programs must meet people where they are, clarify terms, and widen access to real care.
That stance shaped Dragonfly’s approach. Evidence matters. Lived experience matters. A program needs both. Trainings, peer networks, and department level practices are built to be specific and replicable. The aim is not to label people. The aim is to equip people and places with ways to notice, to speak, to connect, to seek help, and to respond.
A conversation in a lecture hall that became a partnership
The memorial for Chris turned out to be more than remembrance. At the end of the event, a faculty member said the phrase many say after a loss, “I wish there was something more we could do.” As a scientist and an advocate Ingram answered, “There is.” She was in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB). She had been studying what prompts people to seek help, what sustains engagement with care, and what improves outcomes. Of course there was more. The faculty member, Matthew Welch, listened. The conversation did not end at sympathy but moved into planning.
That pattern: acknowledge pain, bring evidence, design response, has repeated ever since. Screening a film together. Hosting a discussion. Designing a workshop. Asking what to do not immediately after a conference or a crisis but a few days later, when people have space to feel and think. Building capacity in departments so that the first answers can live inside the places where people work.
From grassroots to a system that travels
Ingram describes Dragonfly’s growth in simple terms. “Our training system works extremely well.” It works because it started at the scale of a lab and a cohort. It honored relationships and then codified what worked into training others. The multiplier came through collaboration. When a department is ready, the work can move from a handful of champions to a shared set of practices.
The organization began formal operations in late 2019. The world immediately changed. COVID moved much of the activity online. Rather than stall, the team adapted. The principle remained the same. Make help real, local, and repeatable.
One of the refrains in Ingram’s account is that Dragonfly is not reinventing the wheel. The work advances through partnerships and honest alignment with others who are trying to solve the same problems. The point is not to own the solution. The point is to get it into rooms where it can be used.
Plain talk about language, timing, and care
Small choices matter. Ingram talks about language with precision. She wants people to understand diagnoses and their differences. She wants colleagues to notice when their metaphors are a barrier rather than a bridge. She cares about timing. After community events that surface painful stories, she prefers to give people a buffer before asking them to commit to something new. Days, not minutes. That respect builds trust. Trust makes the next conversation possible.
She also speaks about response. Departments need playbooks. People need to know whom to call, what to say, what not to say, how to shepherd someone to professional care. Programs need to define success. In this work, a metric can be a person who stays in school, a person who returns to care, a lab that normalizes questions about wellbeing in a one on one, a committee chair who knows how to respond to a disclosure. Scale is not only reach. Scale is fidelity.
What recognition changes
Awards and features do not heal grief, and Ingram does not pretend they do. She treats recognition as validation that the work has value to a wider circle, not as a finish line. “It’s bigger than me,” she says of the honor. Bigger than her. Bigger than any one department. Bigger than any single field. That perspective keeps the focus on the next person who needs help and the next place that can provide it.
The next decade, named in practical terms
Asked what she wants to see in the next five to ten years, Ingram names the needs: Stay disciplined about what works. Train people well. Lift peers to the next level. Embed practices inside departments. Resource the work early and adequately; and, almost as a note to her younger self, get funding sooner. Reliable support lets communities act before crisis, not only after it. It also allows programs to carry people through transitions, from undergraduate to graduate school, from graduate school to postdoc, from postdoc to faculty, where stressors change shape but the need for care remains constant.
She wants institutions to treat mental health as part of the work rather than an add on. She wants leaders to model the conversations they ask others to have. She wants trainees to see pathways that do not require heroic silence. None of that requires reinventing the mission of a department. It requires alignment with the mission. Healthy labs do better science. Healthy classrooms do better teaching. Healthy advising produces better careers.
What Berkeley alums can do
Ingram’s invitations to the Berkeley community are concrete. Keep the circle of care wide. Bring this conversation into real rooms where decisions are made. Support trainings and peer networks that belong to departments, not only to individuals. Keep an eye on timing and language. Offer help that is consistent with the science and with the lived experiences on your campus. Invest early so the next person who asks “What do we do now?”, has an answer readily available.
There is also a personal invitation. Many who are drawn to this work have their own histories. Ingram notes that almost everyone who responds to Dragonfly’s mission, has experienced the need for mental health support firsthand. That is a source of empathy and energy. It is also a reminder that people carry different thresholds and different risks. Programs must be built to welcome that diversity and to direct people to professional care when needed.
A steady practice that honors people
What stands out most in Ingram’s story is its steadiness. She speaks in the language of labs and lecture halls, memorials and meetings. She treats each setting as a place where care can be practiced. It is a room where a student asks for help and is met with clarity rather than confusion. It is a memorial where someone says “I wish we could do more” and then stays to plan what that more might be. It is a training where a new facilitator hears “Welcome to the Dragonfly family,” and understands that the phrase is more than warm. It is a statement of responsibility.
“Action is my coping mechanism” is not a slogan. It is the posture of a scientist turned advocate who refuses to let loss be the last word. The habit is simple: Notice. Name. Learn. Build. Share. Repeat. The lives behind the work are not a footnote. They are the reason the work continues.
