With the holidays rushing toward us, I have been in full sprint mode for the past two weeks. Last Monday I was a guest on The Diane Rehm Show on WAMU (88.5 FM), talking about cancer survivorship. I really enjoy communicating with the public about the issues that we all live on a daily basis.
Later that same day I gave a brief talk at a GU-based sing-a-long of Handel’s Messiah. Having sung the piece in high school I can still recite every note of the Bass 2 line of the Hallelujah Chorus! It is a thrilling piece of music and I was grateful that all proceeds of the performance were directed towards Georgetown Lombardi.
Later that week I flew out to San Diego for a brief appearance at the annual Antibody Engineering meetings: I chaired a session and gave a talk, and came back with a proposal for a collaboration to use RNAi library screening to evaluate the mechanisms of action of a new EGFR family targeting antibody.
After a fairly quiet weekend, I have had a string of wall-to-wall meetings all week here at Georgetown. Some of them have been a lot of fun, such as Monday’s thesis committee meeting for one of my MD/PhD students. Others have been genuinely interesting, such as a dinner meeting with Craig Shriver, who heads the cancer center at Walter Reed; we met to discuss possible collaborations. We had a nearly day-long meeting on Thursday regarding the Center for Systems Biology U54 led by Bob Clarke. We had a chance to present some of our work there, and the level of scientific discourse was fabulous and incredibly helpful.
Wednesday night’s holiday party in the Lombardi Atrium was really wonderful. For me, it was symbolic, as the recent tradition around here has been to have separate parties for the clinical and scientific faculty and staff. That does not represent the best of what we can be, and having everyone together was deeply gratifying to me. I hope this is the start of a new tradition that can expand into other shared activities in the coming months and years.
And, in a similar vein, I was delighted to be part of the MedStar Health Cancer Network Strategic Planning group’s dinner on Thursday evening, where we reviewed the nearly completed strategic plan for rolling out a comprehensive, DC-area-based cancer care plan that intimately connects with research priorities. There is still much to do, but we certainly have come a long way!
Have a wonderful weekend.