CICAMS

  CICAMS stands for Cancer Institute - Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and is my academic home for the next year.  I learned yesterday that it is essentially synonymous with PUMC, which stands for Peking Union Medical College; they are two names for the same thing, although the PUMC has another campus north of the cancer institute in Beijing as well.  CICAMS has multiple buildings, with several shiny new clinic and hospital buildings and several older more dingy research buildings, which is where I will be spending most of my time.  I should get to shadow some doctors in clinic or in the hospital at a later time this year, which will be very interesting.

The most visible CICAMS building which is a new outpatient surgery building.
My building is not visible to the right.

   Adam and I really started work in earnest yesterday, but we were introduced to the premises and got our desks in the grad student office on Tuesday.  We were issued white coats (definitely attending-length, eek! i'm getting ahead of myself! - but strangely short-sleeved), lunch cards, and desk keys.  I have three locks on my desk and three different keys for them!  The office is surrounded by lab rooms and hallway had a strangely familiar smell our first day, until I realized it was lab-strength HCl!  Perhaps it covers up the smell of the squat toilets, which have been fun to learn how to use, :S, as no matter how hard I try, its impossible to go the whole day without having to go to the bathroom, especially after lunch.

My desk in the office, complete with a million papers for us to read.

  
   There are 9 other grad students in our office, all with as-of-yet unpronounceable Chinese names, but one of them had the bright idea to write their names down for us, which makes them at least understandable and reproducible!  Now I have a little seating chart in my desk for when I forget.  Everyone so far has been super nice to us, making sure to get us before they go down to lunch so they can help us order at the canteen window, and showing us where things are, helping us connect to the internet, etc.  Since gchat doesn't work in China, the whole office uses Skype chat to communicate, which is constantly running on everyone's computer so we can all have ridiculous intra-office electronic conversations.  (Which I have done at home many times as well - like texting my sister from the next room).

The view of the office from my desk.  Adam is just to the right of middle on the far wall,
and a Chinese student named Liangyu is on the left.

    We had a meeting with the boss of the Chinese HPV/cervical cancer work group, Dr. Qiao (pronounced "Chow", apparently it means 'super' or 'awesome' in chinese, haha) yesterday and figured out at least vague plans for our research for the year.  I will be starting a study of HPV in HIV+ positive women which was designed by the Fogarty scholar last year and a collaborator at Vanderbilt in a province in southern China called Yunnan.  I will also be developing a survey to be folded into an ongoing cervical cancer prevention study that our lab has to investigate the reactions women have to being given a diagnosis of cervical dysplasia or cancer, and whether that affects their tendency to continue or pursue treatment.  In preparation, both Adam and I will be spending the next several weeks reading reading reading pertinent literature and figuring out how the workgroup works.  I think its shaping up to be an exciting year.