By day, Andrea Letamendi was a model doctoral student in clinical psychology at the University of California, San Diego, who kept her head down while concentrating on her research on post-traumatic stress in Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
By night, she scoured DC Comics, reading up on the latest Batman and Batgirl adventures. She fell in love with superheroes and villains as a child, but hadn't revealed her obsession to her academic colleagues. In her off-hours, she frequented sci-fi and comic conventions, dressing up as characters like the female Darth Vader in a costume complete with LED lights, or the Huntress from Batman, designed out of leather and metal.
Her secret double life dated back to before her days as an undergraduate at Cornell University. For years, she learned to keep her knowledge of the backstories of Mr. Freeze and Clayface a secret from the professional world she wanted to enter, omitting her real name from her twitter handle, @ArkhamAsylumDoc, which was inspired by the fictional psychiatric hospital for criminally insane villains, like the Joker and the Riddler, in Batman's Gotham City.
[For more of this story, written by Erika Hayasaki, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...psychologist/384661/]
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