Research Rocks the House at Symposium 2010

The symposium was fabulous! I don't know whether the audience actually enjoyed it, but I sincerely hope they did. I am SO PROUD of my classmates for doing their research, putting their talks together, and making 10 hours fly by. I arrived for the first panel and stayed till the last (which was when I was going). I thought I'd be really nervous, but seeing so many friendly faces in the audience helped tremendously. I wish I could bottle that euphoric feeling from right afterwards and drink it when I'm feeling down, cause wow. It felt GOOD.

It was so exciting and uplifting and fun. It was totally a dream come true! So much so that I can't write about it in the first person without bawling. So, this is what I wish had been written about it in the San Francisco Chronicle:

February 5th, 2010, Berkeley, CA.

The medical community sat up and took notice as the 15 stars of the Joint Medical Program (JMP) class of 2010 presented their research talks during the all-day symposium at UC Berkeley yesterday. Dr. Coco Auerswald, the head of the Master's program at the JMP, hosted the symposium, which was coordinated by the masterful Jessea Greenman of the JMP staff. Topics ranging from violence to God to STD transmission gave audience members a reason to stay for the 10 hours of sequential talks, as did the fabulous breakfast, lunch, and wine-and-cheese reception organized by the JMP's Mary Rita Algazzali.

The morning began with a 'violence' panel, in which three members of the class presented work about released prisoners' health outcomes, a violence-recidivism intervention for inner city youth, and how residential segregation relates to violent injury. These young investigators took the slight computer glitches in stride, which were in any case soon dealt with by Nina Green, the JMP technology whiz.

Following this, an entire panel was devoted to the single payer debate concerning national healthcare, which drew the audience into a compelling argument about moral intuition and how people come to decisions about policy.

A coffee break gave everyone enough energy to delve into the complex issues the third panelists tackled with their projects, including the use of race in pharmacogenetics, the relationhips between social integration and mortality, immunization coverage in the Native American population, and how Vietnamese-American youth prefer to access healthcare.

After lunch, which was filling, tidy (for those in suits), and delicious, we heard about sex and God at the same time, with a rousing discussion of cervical cancer prevention, concurrent sexual partnerships in Mozambique and their effects of HIV transmission, and how religiosity influences prenatal depression in Appalachia (pronounce it right or she'll throw an 'apple atcha').

More coffee, and then the last round of talks for the day: arsenic poisoning prevention in Bangladesh, participant observation from a residential student program in a retirement community, a sociological analysis of the free clinic movement and Big Pharma, and the finale -- how community ambassadors can force the public sector to do its job while providing immigrant seniors with health services.

The Joint Medical Program should be proud of its graduating class. The future looks bright for our country as these young professionals begin to make their mark in the world. We wish them all the best as they move on to their clinical medicine years (or nurse midwifery, in one case), and will follow their careers with interest.