Eric Sid, M.D., M.H.A. is a program officer in the Office of Rare Diseases Research (ORDR) at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). He’s also a foster dog parent, an advocate, and this year, a mentor to two Coding it Forward Civic Digital Fellows.
But Sid’s career path didn’t always point to the nation’s premier biomedical research agency.
“I grew up in the Bay area and originally did a lot of advocacy work, usually for issues within the Chinatown community,” such as affordable housing, immigrant rights, and youth empowerment, he shared.
“I decided I wanted to go into medicine to be what I like to think of as a nexus of connecting community to different resources and addressing health disparities issues,” Sid said. “I thought I wanted to do primary care.”
But as he was pursuing his medical degree from the University of Washington, Sid realized that primary care may not be the best path for him.
“A lot of the problems that we see right now in patient care are directly a result of the system that we’re being trained under,” Sid said. “I wanted to try to come in and see if there were ways I could help create solutions to the system.”
With Sid’s background, joining the ORDR turned out to be a natural fit.
“For research to occur in rare diseases, you really need patients involved” as advocates to secure research funding and attention, Sid explained. “But also, if you have a small patient population, if you don't have them involved, there's no way you can have any trials.”
Sid joined the rare disease research team at NCATS in 2017 as a Presidential Management Fellow. He has since become the lead for the Genetic and Rare Diseases (GARD) Information Center, which provides free, comprehensive, plain-language information on rare and genetic diseases to the public, and the Rare Diseases Registry (RaDaR) program, which offers guidance for establishing and maintaining patient registries. Additionally, he oversees the NCATS Toolkit for Patient-Focused Therapy Development, which disseminates best practices for patient-partnered research through collaborations between patients and caregivers, community organizations, researchers and NIH/U.S. Food and Drug Administration staff.
With a focus on modernizing the services and resources his programs support, Sid finds himself dealing regularly with data science-related challenges. When the opportunity to match with technology-focused Civic Digital Fellows arose, he was more than happy to be a mentor to not one, but two Civic Digital Fellows, Jennifer John and Angel Nugroho.
John and Nugroho are both working on the GARD program with Sid. John is working to automate the process by which information flows into the rare disease website. Nugroho is working on what the site produces for a user when they search the database.
“The value add for us is to have the opportunity to have a new set of eyes, to have someone that’s innovative, that’s thinking differently,” Sid said. “In many ways, these students have more data science expertise than my staff.”
The Office of Data Science Strategy at NIH works with institutes and centers like NCATS and with Coding it Forward to bring fresh perspectives to tackle computational challenges facing the biomedical research workforce each summer. ODSS will feature fellows and mentors from the 2020 cohort throughout the summer.
