Summer Institute Comes to a Close

by Nicole VanKim

Guest Blogger, Reporting from the Summer Institute 2011

Friday was the final day of the Summer Institute. We presented all of our hard work over the past month with much excitement and sadness. Excited to have accomplished and learned so much in such a short period of time and sad that the Institute was ending. I am sure that many of the bonds of friendship formed over the past month will continue to grow although we will be States away from each other.

I would be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Judith Bradford, the co-director of the Summer Institute, for her leadership and passion in moving LGBT health research forward as well as providing such a great training opportunity for a new generation of researchers who are dedicated to improving the health of our communities. In addition, Dr. Aimee Van Wagenen, also a co-director of the Summer Institute, has been an amazing source of daily support and sanity over the past month. Her dedication to LGBT health research and mad organization skills has made the Institute an awesome experience. Finally, Sari Reisner, whose expertise and enthusiasm for statistics has helped us with the data analysis for our final projects and has kept us calm as we ran into problems and stressed out about completing our projects.

In addition to the leaders of the Summer Institute, I need to thank the Network for the opportunity to share my experience at the Summer Institute. Although I cannot share the specifics about everyone’s project (I should add though that as projects become public through publication or conference presentations, I will try to continue to blog about that), I will leave you with a product of the Summer Institute that is publicly available. I present to you the “2011 Summer Institute Statertainment” video (statertainment is essentially the incorporation of statistics into pop music):