2016 ARHP Award Winners Discuss Their Contributions to Rheumatology

Q: Mentorship is extremely important to the practice of medicine these days. What is the value of mentoring? What lessons did you learn from your mentor?

A: Excellent mentorship is foundational, critical. Mentors help you identify meaningful research questions and the best ways to answer them. They also play a critical role in helping you navigate a host of career-related decisions and challenges. I’ve had a number of different mentors in different areas, and they’ve each taught me different things. They have played a huge role in helping me learn how to write a successful grant proposal and helping me to carry that out.

Q: What has the ACR/ARHP meant to you?

A: ARHP has been such a great professional community. I’ve been privileged to serve alongside so many committed researchers and clinicians on various committees. It’s been a great experience to be part of the larger community that seeks to improve the care and lives of people with rheumatic disease.

ARHP Distinguished Educator Award

Cynthia Crowson, MS

Associate Professor and Statistician, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.

Background: Statistician isn’t a term laymen associate with rheumatology. But Ms. Crowson has been doing both for more than 25 years. An average day involves analyzing data from research studies involving rheumatologic diseases.

“I help with all parts of the research process, including study design, grant and protocol development, data collection plans, finding inconsistencies in data, analyzing data, preparing abstracts, manuscript, presentations and posters,” she says.

Ms. Crowson earned a bachelor’s degree from Winona State University in 1989 and followed up with a master’s degree in statistics from Iowa State University in 2005. She’s presented more than 20 times at ACR/ARHP Annual Meetings and became an ARHP member in 2010.

‘I would like to see more statisticians involved in rheumatic disease research. Research studies are becoming increasingly complex, and researchers who perform their own statistical analyses are not always aware of the latest statistical techniques.’ —Ms. Crowson

Q: How did you go from a math degree to rheumatology?

A: Statistics is a very flexible field that can be applied to a wide variety of other fields. Statistics are used in medicine to help us understand diseases and who is affected by them, as well as to help with medical decision making through analyses of randomized trials to assess competing treatments and observational studies to determine risks for various outcomes.

Q: How did you make the transition from statistics to epidemiology?