Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Gave the John E. Enders Lecture at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Great audience, SRO. Extremely well-received. Spent entire day meeting with faculty and students. They are so young, I feel like some historic figure to them. Some were not even born yet when the AIDS epidemic was recognized in 1981. I spoke on “Ending the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: From Scientific Advances to Public health Implementation”. Went up the night before and had dinner with Jenny in the North End. She is doing great. Just finished the first year of her 6 year Ph.D program at Boston College in Clinical Psychology. Had tough year following her bicycle accident that resulted in a severe concussion. Recovery had been slow, but she is much improved now with some residual headaches. May 30 – June 1, 2014 – Went to Indianapolis to watch Ali row for Stanford Varsity 1 boat in the NCAA Women’s crew Championship Tournament. Went with Chris and Megan and met Jenny coming from Boston at the Indianapolis Airport. Stanford and Ali have been amazing this year. Stanford was not expected to get to NCAA tournament, yet they won the “Big Row” against arch-rival Cal-Berkeley. Then they won the PAC-12 Tournament and now they are in NCAA. Ali was selected as the Scholar-Athlete of the Year in the PAC-12 for Women’s Crew!! This is huge since she was first among all women crew members in the PAC-12. She had the highest GPA (4.05) of all athletes in any sport in the PAC-12. Also, she was chosen for the 3rd year in a row as the first team Academic All-PAC-12 team. She also was voted as “most inspirational” by her team mates In the NCAA tournament they won the semi-finals by 4/100ths of a second. Had a somewhat disappointing Grand Finals Race coming out 6th in the race (started off slow and could not catch up) and 4th overall for the tournament. Ali was obviously disappointed, but what a year she had!