MEMBER SPOTLIGHT

Clair is a biostatistician for the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, whose focus is on exercise trials for physical therapy. On a typical day on the job, Clair is conducting data analysis from both “observational and clinical randomized trials.” These trials, many of which are ongoing over the course of many years, are both within the university and external, spanning across the country. “The big national or international one is for multi-ligament knee injuries,” says Clair, “and they’re seeing if early or delayed knee surgery, and earlier or delayed rehab, have an effect on outcomes where we follow people who've had these injuries for 2 years, so there’s a ton of data.”

The work that Clair does represents Pitt in publications and in the general scientific community. Her team is a great asset to researchers who need answers from their data sets. “As a data center, we started out super small, and the more work we do, people are really satisfied…and the word spreads. And we’re just getting bigger and bigger, like getting more and more grants and more and more people want to work with us.” Clair’s work typically ramps up towards the end of studies when it is time to start digging into results, but there is also an active data-monitoring process that she engages in to ensure everything is being collected correctly. She has also “diversified into creating clinical report forms and even data entry” to ensure tasks are done correctly and with care while being part of a small team. 

This work is important to Clair: “I have wanted a job where I could have financial stability but also help people in some form. I didn’t want to just help some CEO get richer. So, in biostatistics, we’re kind of helping to advance science… because their clinical trials are like how we find out what medical treatments work for different things and also what are protective or risk factors for different diseases. Just advancing the medical literature…makes me feel like I’m contributing in some way.”

Clair got involved with the graduate worker union efforts while in grad school and continued supporting the union after becoming a Pitt staffer. On the importance of being involved, she said, “we [don’t] have a say…in the circumstances of our job or the conditions we work under. The university could just do whatever it wants with no repercussions. So we need to be able to protect ourselves and fight for each other. And because no one has our back unless we keep us safe… The university is only looking out for itself, unfortunately, so we need to have a voice.”