Pre-Arrival Jitters

It's hard to believe after first receiving the news in March that I leave for Geneva tomorrow. My bags are pretty much packed and all my many, many to do's are finally taken care of... so today is a relax-as-best-I-can day. But I did want to write a pre-arrival post to start off this blog and let those who don't know already know what is going on in my life.

I was lucky enough in March to be awarded a grant/scholarship/whatever you want to call it from the Johns Hopkins Vaccine Initiative (JHVI) to spend fall 2012 working at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland in the Immunizations, Vaccines, and Biologicals (IVB) department. My focus in grad school at Hopkins was vaccine policy and I was selected by Dr. Raymond Hutubessy at WHO to assist in the research on his project on the broader economic impact of vaccines. I am going to be conducting epidemiological research on the health outcomes and other indirect economic effects of recently marketed vaccines (rotavirus, PCV, and Hib, specifically) in order to attempt to more completely show exactly what the impact of introducing a specific vaccine in a country's national immunization plan is on that country's health. One of the goals of this project, in other words, is to develop a protocol by which lower middle income countries can decide what prevention policies and programs to implement with limited resources, whether that is introducing a vaccine or something else. Potentially, I will also have time to work on another project of Dr. Hutubessy's --- a cost-effectiveness analysis of delivery systems for the HPV vaccine --- but the first study will be the priority. Dr. Hutubessy hopes that I will have a journal article or two to publish before the end of the year, which would be especially exciting for me since most of my work consists of confidential or internal documents.

I will arrive in Geneva on Friday morning and have this weekend to get settled in my apartment (I am living with a WHO employee, Victoria, in an apartment building that's about a 15 minute walk from the WHO) before my first day on Monday, September 10. There are also 3 other students who have received this scholarship, so I will have a few familiar-ish faces once I'm over there. One of these students, Jill, was in all of my vaccine classes and we have made plans to travel around together. Jill will be living on the same block as I am in another apartment building and we will be sharing an office at IVB. I am just glad that I have someone to walk to work with on Monday since I imagine the WHO buildings might be overwhelming.

So wish me luck on my transatlantic journey tomorrow. I return on December 21 (if the world doesn't end), but I hope to update this blog with my Swiss adventures between now and then.