The Research Design Associates Blog

After getting my massage certificate I started making a decent living and enjoyed my work immensely. I enjoyed interacting with and helping people.  As a result of not being educated early on I always found concepts difficult to grasp so being able to touch a muscle and call it by its name, or massage someone’s shoulders until they were loose came much easier to me. This massage skill was concrete and somewhat spiritual, but not necessarily intellectual. I felt comfortable with this work and starting this would give me the confidence I would need later to embark on new dreams.

During my time working for the Rome Agency for the Preparation of the Jubilee Year 2000, I had changed my mind again: the desire to continue to study and investigate similar research problems was ripe inside me.  I started to study again, and I won a fellowship for a PhD in Operations Research at the University of Rome La Sapienza.

I am an Assistant Professor of Operations Research at the University of Salerno in Italy, and I am currently working on a two year assignment as a researcher at the Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology. But that's not how it started out. My story tells of a path that is tortuous and far from linear.

This blog, as you may know, is a way to document the path—however haphazard and zig-zag it may be –of “arriving” at a career in STEM.  At this point in my life, however, I feel much more like I’m becoming than arriving, so I consider this my attempt to describe a somewhat tumultuous journey to my fifth and final year in Emory University’s MD/MPH program.