Sara Luckhaupt, epidemiologist, on becoming a disease detective: transcript

Key points

• As a child she loved mystery books and wanted to solve mysteries without being a police detective.
• Her father showed her a book called The Medical Detectives, which introduced her to epidemiology.
• She joined CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer and the U.S. Public Health Service as a medical officer.
• Epidemiology appealed to her because it can help more people at once than treating one patient at a time.
• She says the work needs curiosity and tenaciousness, like a good detective.
• Her sleep study found that people in different jobs are less likely to get the recommended amount of sleep than people in other jobs.

Chapters

1. 0:01Childhood love of mystery books and medical detectives
2. 0:56Joining CDC and the Public Health Service
3. 1:50Life outside work
4. 2:23Why workplace health matters and skills needed
5. 3:03Studying how jobs affect sleep
6. 3:41Serving working people across the U.S.

Full transcript

0:01When I was a kid, I really loved to read. I think my mom was always telling me, get up off the couch and put that book down and go outside and play. But one of the things that I really liked to read was mystery books. And I liked any kind of mystery. And I thought, well, it would be really exciting to be a detective and be able to solve mysteries. But I really didn't want to be like a police detective and have to deal with the bad guys and the danger and everything. So I think it was my dad that showed me this book called The Medical Detectives at one point.

0:56And so I started reading about these medical detectives that solved health-related mysteries, and so I started learning that that was kind of an epidemiologist could be a medical detective. I joined CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, and at the same time I also joined the U.S. Public Health Service as a medical officer, which is why I have the uniform. My father is a family physician, and I saw what a difference he could make in people's lives by helping them with their health, but I didn't want to have the lifestyle that he had or work the hours that he worked. And also, I learned that epidemiology, you can help more people at one time or in any field of public health, really, rather than just working with one person or one patient at a time.

1:50Well, I try to spend most of my time that I'm not at work hanging out with my family. I have a husband and two young kids. I also like to do some kind of arts and crafts type of things, and in the past, I've written and illustrated some children's books, mostly just for family, but I did do one coloring book as a medical student. At least at some point in your life, most people are going to have a job.

2:23And there are just so many things in the workplace that can affect your health. And I think that it's really important that people should be able to go to work and come home from work and be at least as healthy as they were when they went to work. I think you have to have a lot of curiosity, similar to a good detective. You have to be able to come up with the questions that you want to answer. And then you have to have a lot of tenaciousness or not giving up. I like being able to ask a question, like, you know, how does your work affect something such as how much you sleep?

3:03Like, one day I saw a report that showed that there are differences in the amount of sleep that women versus men get. There are differences in the amount of sleep people of different ages get. And I thought, being in occupational health, what about people's jobs? Does that affect how much sleep they get? So, I was able to, in this case, look at some data that were already collected, other times I do a survey to collect the data and try to answer that question, and I found that yes, people that have different jobs are definitely less likely to get the recommended amount of sleep than people in other jobs.

3:41My patients and my customers are all of the U.S. people, and especially working people, working in occupational safety and health, and that I'm not just trying to serve one specific group of people, but all other people in the U.S.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Science Speaks - Talking to Women in Science (Sara, 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.