Rita Schinnar

Rita Schinnar’s professional career followed an unconventional trajectory. Her education at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Pittsburgh prepared her for a career in the public sector, focused on public administration and public finance policy. Immediately upon graduation, which coincided with a downturn in the US economy, opportunities for federal government employment were foreclosed because Rita was not an American citizen at that time, and then-President Gerald Ford decreed that only American citizens were eligible for hire for government positions.

As good fortune would have it, Rita secured a position at the School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania to help develop a new program in Clinical Epidemiology. She remained in that position for many years, during which time her responsibilities had evolved from writing training and research grants, to conducting clinical epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology research projects, developing research instruments, performing data analysis, writing research articles for peer-reviewed journal publications, co-authoring book chapters, teaching research methods and grant writing to clinical Fellows, mentoring Fellows in their thesis research, and serving as Managing Editor for several textbooks and reference books on pharmacoepidemiology. Other work during this career included consulting on Committees of the Federal Food and Drug Administration, the Institute of Medicine, and pharmaceutical companies. Also, teaching for several years a course on drug regulation at the College of Pharmacy and Science (now, the University of the Sciences) in Philadelphia.

This experience shows how an education in one field (public administration and public finance policy) could enable a productive career in another field (epidemiology and public health), by applying concepts, analytic reasoning, and research methods from one content area to a new content area in a different discipline. This knowledge transfer started with being handed, on the first day on the job, the hefty volume of "Fundamentals of Epidemiology," and from there on it was entirely on-the-job learning. As the field of modern epidemiology was then in its infancy, it and Rita continued to develop in parallel.

Rita’s studies and interests in European history and American history and her enthusiasm for travel have produced numerous travel logs and short stories, and more recently three memoirs.

Rita’s first memoir, "Bela’s Story: A Brave Journey Through Unforgiving Times," co-authored with William A. Meis, was written in homage to her father who she misunderstood and underappreciated for much of her young and adult life. She was fortunate that he lived a long life and that in old age they both matured and gained understanding and reconciliation.

A second memoir, "Erling’s Journey and Other Sagas: A Norwegian-American's Search for His Viking Roots," co-authored with William A. Meis, tells the stories of the journeys of Norwegian and German immigrants who settled in North Dakota and Minnesota at the turn of the 20th century, as well as the journey of a man searching for his birth parents.

A third book, “Adrian Always: A Humorous memoir Concerning a Young Boy and His Exhausting Grandmother,” co-authored with William A. Meis and illustrated by Arie Schinnar, is an account, told from the boy’s perspective, of his growing pains and feats in early life owing to his relentlessly ambitious grandmother.