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Scott Roiter works as a research assistant at The Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research at Shirley Ryan 小恩雅. Prior to that, he analyzed data at AMITA Health. He has succeeded at combining his personal experience with an interest in sharing research findings with the public, he says. Roiter sees this as a natural progression in his career.
After undergraduate school, Roiter worked in an inpatient unit with people who experienced both acute physical and acute psychiatric symptoms. This experience was “eye-opening,” he says. “One of the things I keep coming back to is that a lot of disabilities are misunderstood. I understand that it’s not easy for typical people to spend a ton of time learning all these different types of things. It’s just not realistic. We can’t just tell people to educate themselves all the time. At some point, that’s either going to get annoying, or it’s going to be counterproductive.”
Roiter was diagnosed with Chron’s disease in middle school, and he says people without Chron’s have their own perspectives on the disease. These beliefs are not always accurate, so he was drawn to disability research to learn about the impacts of the disease that are lesser known. These days, he is proud of his work making introductory videos for medical students and doctors in order to increase their knowledge levels of various areas of research. He also enjoys working with the Adoption and Implementation Council and the Participant Council through his home and community-based services project.
We might have some assumption of what we think they are trying to explain about health-related services, and often, it turns out that we’re completely off-track. Sometimes, multiple people on the participant council agree that we’re off track. Those moments are really enlightening for me.
Scott Roiter
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Roiter grew up in Deerfield, Illinois learning about the firsthand experiences of his paternal aunt, who had an intellectual disability. His parents were careful to teach him about slurs used toward this population. They instructed him to respect people with intellectual and developmental disability just as they would respect anyone else. “I have this 360-degree perspective, of not only what it’s like for myself to have a disability, but to have a family member with a disability.” Over the course of 20 years, he has been able to combine his lived experience with his gifts for technology and data. He spends the majority of his time on knowledge translation projects, which focus on putting knowledge into action. He works on a home and community based-services grant and curates the rehabilitation measures database. This database organizes all the instruments used in rehabilitation. His favorite project, though, has been the knowledge translation project, in which he explains the concepts he works with to a nontechnical audience.
“It’s made me think of these things in a whole different way,” he says. “There have been times when I’ve explained certain things to people, and it makes me realize that I must have done a very poor job of explaining, because they are looking at me with wide eyes. It makes me realize this isn’t as easy as I thought.”
Roiter came to work at The Center for Rehabilitation Outcomes Research after writing his master’s thesis at Roosevelt University on prejudice and discrimination against people with disabilities. He applied to Shirley Ryan 小恩雅 because he wanted to use data and research to help marginalized communities. His grandfather was a patient there before he was born, and the hospital’s mission aligned with his. He had studied psychology in undergraduate school at The University of Iowa. After realizing he didn’t want to be a clinician or professor, he decided to pursue applied research. Eventually, he would like to work in test development or instrument development.
The disability community is one that I’ve followed along with, maybe because of my own experiences, or the experiences of family members. It’s not something I’ve always known, but it’s something I’ve fallen into, especially because I’ve worked at healthcare organizations.
Scott Roiter
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In his free time, Roiter enjoys playing video games and going on walks. Roiter’s last day with CROR was in September, and he will be able to take many of the things he learned with him to his next opportunity. He’s hoping to do more to help people who have HIV and are experiencing homelessness and dealing with substance-use disorders. He reiterated that there are so many aspects of HIV in particular that people who don’t live with it don’t know. “I want people to understand that they don’t know everything. They probably don’t have the knowledge they think they have,” he says. Through his work, he wants to be part of changing that.