Under Dr. Liang’s leadership, the enterprise steadily grew. Dr. Liang was fortunate to recruit Lawren H. Daltroy, DrPH, for an NIH-mandated education expert position at the center. Dr. Daltroy became “my great teacher, scientific soulmate, and center co-architect,” says Dr. Liang. “For us, work was play, and play was work; working with Lawren was magical.” The two developed a synchrony akin to jazz musicians in a jam session, “playing with ideas, pushing each other to new heights,” he explains.
Everyone benefited from their scientific and intellectual largesse and grew personally: trainees were asked to get formal methodologic training at the Harvard School of Public Health and to work with a variety of mentors and researchers at Harvard; nurses, social workers, health educators, psychologists, physical and occupational therapists, health economists, decisions analysts, and biostatisticians worked on common problems; and typists became grants administrators.
Lupus researcher Paul Fortin, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine, University of Toronto and Director of Clinical Research, Canadian Centre of Excellence, was a fellow at the center from 1989 to 1992. He recalls, “Matt was networking for you all the time—but he didn’t let us choose the easy road to do research! And, there was a human side to his mentoring that was quite special. He was not only concerned about our research, but about our well-being.”
Action Research
Underpinning his investigations has been the drive to discover ways to marry clinical discoveries with the real-life needs of patients. “I was taught that academics have an obligation to help people who are faced with getting through the day with various chronic diseases,” notes Dr. Liang.
He applied the rigor of laboratory research to the clinical sciences, and much of his work has been groundbreaking. Dr. Liang’s group was the first to use cost-effectiveness analysis and decision analysis in rheumatology. They developed both the theory and new outcomes measures focusing on the patient’s experience with various chronic diseases, were often the first to identify and test new risk factors in the cause or course of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), and developed the basic methods for using the Nurses’ Health Study, the largest cohort in the world, for epidemiologic studies of systemic rheumatic diseases.
“Much of his methodological contributions are as great as what he has done in rheumatology and lupus,” says Dr. Fortin. “He’s been a great thinker for the lupus field, and like Lavoisier, who defined organic matter, Matt was defining another vocabulary altogether, stressing clinical definitions and the importance of standardizing what you are going to measure.”