JIM MARTIN:  

For MHS graduates from the Stone Age - that is people similar to me - the story of my last some-odd years could be. Interesting. . Of course, your interest or lack of it is your own choice. I retired in 2016 as the Director of the Virginia Cancer Registry in the Virginia Department of Health (VDH). This position was perfect. It provided all the elements of a great job, from supervising a truly wonderful staff of real pros, to budgeting and working with fine people at CDC on federal grants, and disease surveillance improvements, to helping develop software interoperability standards, to. writing epidemiological articles and doing presentations to local, regional, national, and international audiences. So, as I wrote above, the job was most rewarding, and made a minor, yet real, contribution to public health.. After retiring, I discovered that retirement is not all it's cracked up to be. You know, free time, trips to wherever, relaxing in an armchair and petting the dog. Nope. It took maybe about 3 or 4 months to find out that being retired isn't my cup of tea. So, after about a year or so, I cooked up the idea to go live in Taiwan for a couple years and do research there. Having spent maybe about 8 years there in the 80s and 90s, and having learned the language (Mandarin, not Minnan, or Hakka), I took off in 2018 to conduct a couple of research projects. The first was an ana...Expand for more