Greetings to Ampersand readers! I am a new member of the Blog Squad for PRIM&R’s 2015 Advancing Ethical Research (AER15) and 2015 Social, Behavioral, and Educational Research Conferences (SBER15) in Boston this November and look forward to creating interesting and helpful posts for you as the meetings unfold.

Trained as a general internist, I became an HIV disease and addiction medicine specialist during my 20 years of clinical, research, and teaching experience at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). I am currently a vice chair on one of the UCSF Committees on Human Research , but my [...] Read more

Fun fact #1: The first professional organization I joined was PRIM&R, in 2009. I had recently begun serving as a voting alternate on the IRB at the Veterans Administration center where I worked as a chaplain resident. I had been enjoying the IRB work (yes, really—and that was even in the all-paper days) and as it happened, the 2009 AER Conference was taking place in my backyard: Nashville, TN.

The conference sessions I attended were eye-opening and perspective-enlarging. More importantly, presenters and fellow attendees were patient to a fault, answering my many [...] Read more

Twenty five. That’s the number to know. Keep it in your mind. 25 tracks!  So many choices, so much to learn!

I first attended PRIM&R’s Advancing Ethical Research (AER) Conference in 2008. I remember walking into the venue for the first talk and being blown away by the size of it. It still catches me by surprise and this will be my seventh time attending. Compared to other conferences, it’s the variety of selections that brings me back to the AER Conference again and again: I can pick from so many great topics! Of course, the problem is always narrowing down my choices so [...] Read more