Work Update and the Swiss Romande Orchestra

Yesterday was a pretty fantastic day for me, so I just wanted to add another update to let those interested know about my work. As previously mentioned, I am working with Dr. Raymond Hutubessy, who works on implementation research at the Initiative for Vaccine Research within the department of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. If you are confused, so am I... I actually made the following PowerPoint slide in order to figure out where I am within WHO:

So at the WHO Headquarters, I am in the IMR group of the IVR cluster in the IVB department of the FWC office. Whoa. Moving on...

As part of his IMR work, Dr. Hutubessy has been working on a project with several pieces termed the "broader economic impact of vaccines" or BEIV. Yesterday, I had a conference call with Dr. Hutubessy and his BEIV colleague, Dr. Mark Jit --- who works on economic evaluation of vaccine-preventable diseases at the Health Protection Agency in the United Kingdom and also in the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine --- to discuss my research this fall. 

It was a very successful conference call. Based on what has already been done, what will be most helpful for the next steps of their work, and what my personal interests are --- I am going to be doing a systematic review of the long-term productivity gains due to vaccines for enteric diseases (gastrointestinal/diarrheal diseases like rotavirus, cholera, and typhoid). I am working on my research questions, search terms, a list of criteria to grade the strength of the evidence, and a work plan proposal over the next week, and then we are meeting in person next week Thursday to hammer out the specifics. Dr. Hutubessy and Dr. Jit also asked for my help on a secondary project validating their new HPV vaccine costing tool --- since HPV has long been an academic interest, I am also really looking forward to contributing to this project. I only have 3 more days really to get the work done for my primary project, however, as next week Tuesday and Wednesday is the Immunization and Vaccines in Implementation Research (IVIR) Advisory Committee meeting that Dr. Hutubessy is in charge of and I will be attending in its entirety (I'll be helping out with a few logistics and taking notes, but my future research is also going to be mentioned in Dr. Jit's presentation on BEIV!). Anyway, I'd be happy to elaborate on any of the above if you're interested, but I am doing my best to not make this too much of a "toot my own horn" type of post, even though that is probably exactly what it is... The point is really just that I'm excited and looking forward to contributing to this work.

Also, after work, Jill and I also went to a FREE private rehearsal of the Swiss Romande Orchestra at Victoria Hall. So we listened to the orchestra practice two pieces and then listened to the conductor go through the music with them and give notes. The most was great, although it was a bit tedious going through the notes portion. However, two things about it were quite interesting to me: (1) it seemed as if the first violin was the "captain" of the orchestra, and (2) the conductor making the sounds of musical instruments actually sounds different in French than in English, although to the best of my knowledge musical instruments don't have a native language.

P.S. I not only made the pictures in this blog post extra large, but I also went back to the previous posts and made the old pictures bigger, too --- in case you want to revisit!