Modern Healthcare, May 16, 2007 AUSTIN -  Psychiatrist Deborah Peel has become an outspoken advocate for patient privacy rights, founding the Austin, Texas-based not-for-profit Patient Privacy Rights Foundation, and working to develop an effective coalition of organizations across the political spectrum to lobby Congress, but hers was not a direct path to advocacy. Peel was born in 1951 to Kathryn and Abraham Charnes. A noted mathematics professor, Peel's father taught at what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Charnes moved in 1968 to Austin to take a position with the University of Texas, where, in 1975, he was named as a finalist for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Peel says she acquired a passion for reading early in life and what she calls "the testing gene." She entered the University of Texas at age 16, then tested out of the last two years of college to enter medical school-at age 18-at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. In 1974, the 22-year-old finished her basic medical training and began her residency in psychiatry at Galveston. In 1977, her residency completed, she entered into solo private practice. Peel served as chief of psychiatry at 365-bed Brackenridge Hospital in Austin from 1979 until 1990, when she was asked to help the Texas Society of Psychiatric Physicians with lobbying the Texas Legislature.