Angelo Tinazzi

This spotlight was featured in March 2019.

Angelo serves on the ADaM Team and co-leads the CDISC Italian User Network.

How did you begin working in clinical research? 

By chance!!! I did my mandatory civil service in Italy in the nineties while I was still at University. I was assigned to an Oncology Clinical Trial Unit in a Pharmaceutical Research Center in Milan, then stayed there for about 10 years before moving to the Pharma industry. I did so many things there: developing clinical database to support clinical trials, meta-analysis, general researches in public health, observational studies, a lot of collaborations with similar organizations in Europe and also tried to develop and propose my own data standard to improve the way we were collecting and analyzing data. It’s where I met the best people and mentors of my life and I would not be what I’m today without them and that’s also where I met my wife (I did interview her with my manager).

What did you want to be when you grew up?  

Like many Italian kids being a football player was my dream, especially for the team from my hometown Milan (the team with black and red stripes not the one with black and blue stripes!); this was at least until I was 12 then I realized I had no chance to succeed. At one point I dreamt to be a painter but not an artist (that’s probably explain why I’m still painting my house every 3-4 years). Then soon I realized computers and programming languages were a good thing especially when applied to clinical data, so I was so lucky to live the floppy disk era but even tape (mainframe).

How long have you been volunteering at CDISC?

About five years, starting with an ADaM sub-team (Oncology) then as a part of CDISC European Coordinating Committee organizing and chairing the CDISC Interchange in Europe and running the Italian CDISC User Network where I organized three events in Milan for the last three years together with my colleague Silvia Faini from Livanova.

What encouraged you to volunteer your time and expertise with CDISC?  

To see things (standards development) from the inside and bring my expertise and experience (and examples).

You are a CDISC-authorized ADaM Instructor. What do you enjoy about teaching CDISC courses?

I really enjoy doing these kind of things. I like presenting and coaching for example, and I often present at industry conferences such as PHUSE and the CDISC Europe Interchange. It is also an opportunity to discover new needs from the attendees and why not an opportunity to travel. In the last two years I’ve run trainings in Copenhagen, London, Paris, Milan, Warsaw, Basel, Timisoara and soon Amsterdam.

Please provide a tip that someone would find helpful in working with CDISC Standards.

A simple recommendation: don’t get bored, be patient and love the standards! Have a passion for details as they might matter when you submit your data to an agency.  That’s what I try to pass on to my colleagues almost every day, the passion for the data especially when they are organized in a standard way.