VP of Research and Scholarship
Dr. Matthew Thiese’s research focuses on the overlap between a person’s job and their health. This includes everything from musculoskeletal disorders like Low Back Pain or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, to motor vehicle crashes, to COVID-19, to mental well-being. He is interested in identification of potential risk factors, interventions to prevent injury or illness, evidence-based practice for both treatment and prevention, and assessments of worker health and safety fitness-for-duty. His graduate degrees are in Public Health, specifically Occupational Epidemiology and Injury Prevention. He has coauthored 109 articles (29 as first author), 34 practice guidelines and 5 book chapters and is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Utah. He has mentored 19 PhD and Masters Students, and teaches 4 courses. He has more than 10,000 hours giving guest lectures, consulting, and helping move his research into practice among law firms, businesses, governmental and non-governmental organizations and academic institutions around the world. Dr. Thiese has extensive experience in designing and conducting epidemiologic and interventional research having worked with law professionals, first responders, healthcare providers, manufacturing, construction and transportation workers. Some of his highest impact research to date includes research-analyzing relationships between driver health and subsequent crashes in a retrospective cohort of 90,000 drivers. He has been part of multiple large prospective cohort studies evaluating relationships between musculoskeletal disorders and both job and personal factors. He is currently working as an expert for the CDC regarding COVID-19 and am a co-investigator on the largest COVID-19 study regarding transmission rate and vaccine efficacy and conducting multiple epidemiologic studies. Research specifically related to law professionals and students includes currently conducting research into the occupational relationships between hazards of law students and law professionals and their well-being to identify current trends and design effective interventions. He can be reached at matt.thiese@hsc.utah.edu or on linked in at https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-matthew-thiese-43492a4a/. His scholarly record can be accessed at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1ktZFjoAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/myncbi/matthew.thiese.1/bibliography/public/
