Final Approvals Secured.

My boss and my VP have agreed and I will be joining the PHRG on a part-time basis as a Research Scientist. We’ll follow up and review how it’s going at quarterly intervals. My, my boss, and my new mentor. I will have to work a lot harder I think, but I will be getting to do far more exciting stuff than I’ve been doing in a much higher profile environment.

I will have an outward facing website and an excellent new title, and even a horrible fishbowl glass-walled office. It’s very exciting. I share the office, but I think it’s a time share not a concurrent thing. I’m not entirely sure. Those are the trappings. That’s the neat stuff that I’m glad to get instead of the basement cube I have now and for the foreseeable future.

But the really exciting stuff is I get to work on public health and epidemiology again. I get to apply computer simulation to policy and analysis and write blog posts and white papers and give talks and attend meetings where my ideas and innovations will hopefully be taken seriously by people who actually write policy and influence those who write legislation and regulations.

The kind of people, support services, and international credibility that the PHRG has will help my work find its way into better papers and may yield some new grant funding. They have that stuff locked in – it’s a funding machine. They secure millions of dollars a year for their work. I will be able to participate and hopefully benefit those efforts. I’m really excited. Apprehensive, naturally, but excited.

I hope to be able to do some good work.