SAVIR Member Spotlight: Russell Griffin, PhD

I am the Associate Director of the Trauma Care Delivery Research Unit within the UAB Center for Injury Science, which is the research arm of the Division of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. As a result, a good bit of my research involves secondary and tertiary prevention efforts centered around trauma care. My research these days involves leveraging electronic health record data to help determine how best to care for injured patients during the pre-hospital, resuscitation, and early hospital stay stages of their recovery. Currently, we are working on a project using GIS analysis to examine how emergency departments with teletrauma capability can increase access to trauma care across the nation. I got into injury epidemiology in part by interest in injury and in part by sheer luck. As a grade school student, I wanted to be a burn surgeon. Before I was born, my grandmother was in a house fire and was badly burned; she lived with us while I was in grade school, and when I was older, she told me about the burns she suffered and the care she got (interestingly, at UAB where I currently work). I lived in a rural area, and my neighbors growing up were part of the volunteer fire department; I spent a lot of time up at the VFD learning about their EMS work. Then, when I was a junior in high school, I witnessed a car lose control and careen off a tall hill into a swamp; I stopped to help, and watching the EMS team in action cemented my interest in injuries. After my first year of undergrad, I decided medicine was not for me as I wanted to work in a field that was more math related. In honesty, I did not know about much about epidemiology until my senior year of undergrad. I thought it was just about infectious diseases, so when I first started my coursework for my Master’s in Epidemiology, I wanted to study infectious diseases. But, by luck, my Master’s advisor worked as an epidemiologist with the Center for Injury Science. I wanted to learn more about SAS coding, and he hired me to work on his injury research for a semester. My first study was examining the correlation between DUI arrests and DUI-involved motor vehicle collisions using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. I guess he liked the work I did because he asked me to stay on as an analyst, and my career grew from there.

How long have you been a member of SAVIR? What has been your favorite part about being involved with SAVIR?

I have been a member since 2012. I have always enjoyed seeing the different types of work that are being doing in the area of injury prevention. Since I work with the Division of Trauma at UAB, a lot of my focus is on the post-injury, tertiary prevention side of things, so it’s great to see the work that is being done in the areas of primary and secondary prevention.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career so far?

I have enjoyed being able to take things I have observed or experienced in my life, make them into research questions and studies, and turn them into actionable items. Injuries are a very tangible disease that are a common part of our lives, whether it’s knowing someone who has been injured, being injured ourselves, seeing a motor vehicle collision, or hearing on the news about gunshot wound victims or a consumer product that is causing injuries. It’s rewarding for me to know that the research I do can potentially be used to help prevent injuries or help someone recover from their injury. Injury epidemiology is a unique epidemiological field in that it has a number of publicly available datasets for research. These have helped me take those occurrences and turn them into actionable research. For example, when my then two-year old son one day decided to spring towards the television in the living room and start shaking it, I turned that into a study of how the rate of television tip-over injuries change in relation to the prevalence of flat panel televisions (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19651996/). When I got my first car that had automatic collision notification, I looked into whether ACN affects emergency response time (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33040588/). My favorite story to tell students and others when I talk about my job is when, during a research meeting on the top story of the main UAB hospital, I watched an aeromedical helicopter taking off from the helipad, and on a whim looked up the tail number of FlightAware where I realized that you could download data on aeromedical flights. This led to studies examining how to correctly map aeromedical flight paths (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32037046/), how mission ground time (i.e., the time it takes the crew to prepare for flight and get off the ground) affects population aeromedical coverage (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33069390/), and a study that examined whether there were certain patterns of population characteristics related to aeromedical retrieval (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33000070/).

What do you like to do in your free time?

As a doctoral student, I was a certified Crossfit trainer and worked at a local Crossfit gym (I got a free membership, so that was a nice perk). I really enjoyed the Olympic weightlifting aspect of it, particularly the physics of it and how small movements of your body during the lift could decide whether or not you successfully completed the lift. Though I do not do Crossfit these days (a combination of having kids and my joints yelling at me all the time from all of the pull-ups and squats), I have a gym setup in my home and still work out (somewhat) regularly. I also like to golf much for the same reason as Olympic weightlifting—it’s something where small movements during the swing can greatly impact how well you hit the ball, and it’s fun to focus on how to perfect the swing mechanics. I don’t like golf carts (for good reason: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18545124/), so I walk 9 holes about once a weekend—it’s about 5km in total and it’s nice to escape the noises of the city for a little bit. That said, I am a far better epidemiologist than golfer, so you won’t see me in a green jacket anytime soon.