My new job!

I am very excited about my new job at the Center for Excellence in Peru. My advisor is Dr Jaime Miranda who recently finished his PhD on the Peru MIGRANT study, which looked at the effects of migration on cardiovascular risk factors. Interestingly, migration from rural areas to Urban areas contributes a lot to obesity, especially in women. We have been approved from the NHLBI to enroll 2000 Peruvians in our epidemiological study on cardiovascular disease project and we'll enroll 1000 for the chronic COPD study. We will start field work early next year in Tumbes and Lima. I am currently working hard on developing some proposals for a few abstracts using the previously collected PREVENCION and PERU MIGRANT database, among other large databases in Latin America that our group has access to [the Latin American Study of Obesity (LASO) database]. I will help our group (of 4 people) apply for more grants to enroll more people or start other projects, like national stroke and myocardial infarction registries.

Today I am going to a clinical research training course at the Merck offices in Lima. It's two days of intensive training on biostatistics, research design, protocols, running clinical trials, etc. but in SPANISH! Eeeks! I'm bringing my medical Spanish dictionary in my bag, just in case :)