Dr. Robert Cook
Greetings! It is now mid-summer in Gainesville and it is hot. Summer is the time for several scientific meetings, and many of our team have been presenting at conferences including the Continuum HIV conference, the Research Society on Alcohol, and the College of Problems on Drug Dependence. We are very proud of the many students, postdocs and faculty who have been (and who will be) presenting at these meetings.
Summer is also a time for some turnover for staff who are moving on to new things and students who are graduating. Congratulations to Drs. Christina Parisi and Rebecca Fisk-Hoffman, who have completed all their requirements and are graduating in August! And we will miss our staff Sophie Maloney, Emmely Pavela, and Anne Gracy who are moving to new locations or new positions this summer. It will be hard to replace three staff – so we will be looking to hire a senior research coordinator (to oversee much of our SHARC activity) and a new research assistant to help with recruitment. We also are going to have some new PhD students and post-docs working with SHARC starting this fall.
In other big news, our Florida Cohort Wave IV is officially underway! We have enrolled new participants at our partner clinics in Melbourne and West Palm Beach. We can provide more updates about the goals of Wave IV in a future edition of SHARC Bites – and we will be creating a new questionnaire for this study during the fall semester.
Finally, many of our team have been hunkered down working on a major grant proposal to create a new North Central Florida Developmental Center for AIDS Research. This is a collaboration with researchers (at UF, FSU and the Scripps Biomedical Research Institute in Jupiter) as well as community-based partners. I greatly appreciate the faculty, students, and staff who have been helping to accomplish this.
Have a great summer everyone!