Damian Schwartz, Program Manager II for the Basic, Translational and Preclinical Research Lab in the UAB Department of Surgery, describes his job in two words: problem solving.
It is a fitting description for a role that has no single shape. On any given morning, Damian might be reviewing equipment for an IT audit, sorting out a contract, tracking chemicals, coordinating a lab move, or working through long columns of numbers. He arrives before most of the department, checking not just his inbox but the building and all the operations within it. The work is largely invisible when it goes well, which is precisely the point.
What makes him good at it is not one skill but many, gathered over a working life that looks, at first glance, like it belongs to several different people.
Damian is no stranger to hard work and accomplishing the task at hand, regardless of the early or late hours. Before he worked at UAB, Damian reminisces on his time at Compass Bank, now PNC by way of BBVA, where he processed checks from 6 p.m. until 6 a.m., before going straight to class. For hours, he fed checks past a machine and typed without stopping. “I can close my eyes and type numbers,” he says. Decades on, that muscle memory quietly powers a job built on financial data and long account numbers. “It saves me a lot of time and energy.”
“I think of myself as a jack of all trades,” he says, “someone who's acquired a lifetime of assorted knowledge. And that's very useful here.”
Employee by day, student by night
Damian's connection to the Department of Surgery goes back further than most. He was just 21 when he took a job as a mail clerk, working days while earning a studio art degree in photography and digital art at UAB by night.
The mailroom, in the years before email, was the pulse of all institutional operations. Every morning brought roughly six sacks of mail, each close to 50 pounds, full of bills and documents the department could not function without. “If we didn't have the mail sorted in the morning, it would cause a dysfunction people can't really picture today,” Damian shares.
It was in this role, where he learned the lesson that still guides his work to this day. If everyone keeps their own piece of the department running, the whole thing works. “You have to be organized, and you have to be reliable,” he says.
Finding research
As with most journeys, the best discoveries are those we never planned. About twelve years ago, the department's executive administrator, Ron Brown, needed help with a few lab tasks, such as logging chemicals, organizing equipment and managing lab moves, and asked Damian to take them on. Damian excelled at keeping the laboratories organized and operating well. The tasks kept coming, and the role soon turned into Damian’s next job.
“Mr. Brown took me under his wing and helped me understand how research runs, and how it's different from the administrative side,” Damian says. “It moved me from someone who didn't have much research knowledge to someone who had quite a bit. This position just naturally suited me.”
Damian’s history of dedication and enthusiasm for his work inherently translated to his new role. Just as he did in his first role at UAB, Damian watched how a system worked, learned its moving parts, and made himself the person who kept it running.
The people
Ask Damian what he is proudest of, and he does not name a project. He lists colleagues and friends within the department. The realization that has stayed with him longest came decades ago, when he was still a mail clerk. A coworker had just learned her husband's death was near.
“I happened to be the one there in that moment, so I tried to comfort her as best I could,” he says. “Weeks after he passed, she came and thanked me. That made me feel special, because it was one of the hardest moments of her life.”
Over the years, he has known many of the department's physicians simply as people passing in the hallway, some of whose names would later become landmarks of UAB Medicine and the national landscape of healthcare. “A lot of them aren't here at UAB anymore, but they're still part of this department, because they're part of me.”
And, without a doubt, the feeling is mutual. Damian is singlehandedly an institution within the Heersink School of Medicine and UAB Department of Surgery – often serving as the reference point and resource for countless individuals across the research landscape. It’s a daily occurrence to hear the answer “Ask Damian, he’ll know,” as a response to any number of complex research administration questions.
The hillside
The instinct to make things, and to fix them, does not switch off when Damian leaves work. Behind his house is a large hillside he has turned into a garden, planting flowers simply to watch beautiful things grow. He still does concrete sculpture too, a return to the art degree he earned in between day shifts at work.
When he eventually leaves UAB, that is where he expects to spend his time. “I look forward to years of creating art and relaxation, and giving back to people,” he says. “A lot of people have been kind to me.”
He hopes to be remembered plainly, as someone who always gave his best shot. And the advice he offers anyone starting out is the same principle that carried him from a racetrack and a mailroom to the heart of a research department.
“Be open, and be humble,” he says. “Be willing to learn from other people. At the end of the day, that's what matters.” And, certainly, Damian has spent his career as the living exemplification of these impactful words.