Video transcript · 5 min · 616 words

Epidemiologist Elizabeth Masterson on her path into science: transcript

Elizabeth Masterson, an epidemiologist at NIOSH, describes how she came to the field, from planning to be a teacher and then a psychologist to discovering she could succeed in science. She explains why evidence matters for protecting workers and encourages others to try science.

Key points

She enjoys the variety of epidemiology and feels her work can affect workers' lives.
Her mother worked at NIOSH, and a mother-daughter day in her teens gave her a first look at the field.
She began in psychology, thinking it had no math or science, until statistics was required.
A teaching assistant for the statistics course pushed her toward research and the honors program.
She found that doctoral study depended more on perseverance than on being super smart.
She advises setting aside time for family, friends and sports, and trying science to see if you like it.

Chapters

0:00Why she loves being an epidemiologist
0:59From teaching and psychology to science
1:49A mentor and the decision to pursue a PhD
2:32Using evidence to protect workers
3:15Work-life balance
3:45Advice to try science

Full transcript

0:00One of my favorite things about being an epidemiologist is just the variety to the job, there's never a boring day, and really being able to go after those answers to research questions that I myself can now go out and try to find the answers. And I absolutely love my job. I feel like I'm actually doing a good thing. I'm impacting potentially workers' lives, and there's just no price you can put on that.

0:59My mother works at NIOSH and has been there since I was a young child. My mom brought me in for mother-daughter day, probably in my mid-teens, and I got to see what epidemiologists do, and I got to hang out with industrial hygienists and other researchers and kind of see what they do, and that was sort of my first introduction. I never expected to be in epidemiology. I started out wanting to be a teacher, and then I couldn't afford to go to school. And then when I could afford to go to school, I thought, I'm going to be a clinical psychologist. So I went into psychology. One of the reasons I went into psychology was there was no math or science, or so I thought. And then they required statistics.

1:49The teaching assistant for that course really had a huge impact on my trajectory into the field of science. She got me through that course. She really helped me with statistics, but more than that, she said, look, you need to be a research assistant. You need to get into the honors program. You need to be teaching assistant. Here are the things you need to do to go forward. And without her, I don't think I would have done well. I don't think I would have stayed in science. she really had a huge impact on my life. When I was thinking about a PhD program, I thought, I can't really do that, those are super smart people, and I don't really have those kind of qualities.

2:32Well, I decided to go ahead and try it anyway. And when I tried it, I was like, wait a minute, I can do this. And it was, I found out that it really had more to do with just sticking with it and less to do with being super smart. We want to make sure we're really employing the best measures to protect workers. And we don't want to guess about what those best measures are. We actually want to find evidence to say these are working, these are not working, and then employ those preventative measures.

3:15When I'm doing research, I can look for the most accurate answer possible. And I don't have to worry about what that answer is. There is not an answer that I should find. It is what it is, and we can go with it. You want to make sure that the job you love doesn't become the job you hate because it's taking over your entire life. So I really try to set aside time for family, for friends, for spiritual life, for sports.

3:45It just really makes you a more effective person when you come to the job. If you have any interest at all in science, or maybe even if you don't, try it. You're not going to know until you try it whether or not you can do it, which you probably can, and whether or not you're going to like it, and you may just love it. That's what happened to me. I thought I couldn't do it, I was wrong, I could do it, I could do it well, and I ended up loving it.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Science Speaks - Talking to Women in Science (Liz, Epidemiologist).webm by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (2013-11-04), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.