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Dedicated to Adolescent Health, Michelle Kipke Talks About What It Takes to Run that Extra Mile.
From the Trenches by Noël Alumit
Michelle Kipke, a twenty-year veteran in the AIDS fight, knew she was different. She says, “My childhood was spent feeling very out of step with the world around me.” She was raised by a single mom in an affluent area of Los Angeles surrounded by “God-fearing, judgmental adults.” When she was a teenager, she came out as a lesbian and, according to Ms. Kipke, “wanted to pursue causes of social justice rather than a high-paying, corporate job. That really made me feel different.”
When she turned eighteen, she went to college. “I ran as fast and as far away as possible—New York City! I did my undergrad studies at New York University. It took a while to get used to the fast pace of New York City. I came to love it and very much became a New Yorker! I continued mygraduate studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Yeshiva University in the Bronx, in a PhD program in Experimental/Health Psychology.”
Being in New York in the 1980s provided Michelle with an interesting vantage point. “I was at school in the Bronx from 1984 to 1989, and that was precisely the time when the AIDS epidemic crashed upon us in New York. I recall when there were still just thirteen cases, and then, within nine months, it seemed like everyone was dying. I recall sitting in a room of gay psychologists with the majority coughing with pneumocystis or covered with KS lesions. It was everywhere and by 1985 I had lost three very close friends.”
She found that her true calling was working in adolescent health and development. She notes, “My entire professional career has been spent, one way or another, trying to figure out how to keep adolescents and young adults healthy.” She worked for the first Adolescent AIDS Program at Montefiore Medical Center dealing with HIV-infected teens. “I ended up developing the first HIV prevention intervention developed for and evaluated with adolescents. I also held some of the first adolescents to die of AIDS. It all felt—as it still does—like such a horrible loss.”
One can imagine how working with HIV and adolescents can be devastating.
“The first few years in N.Y. were very difficult,” says Michelle. “I watched so many children die alone, without family to comfort them, in large part because they were gay.”
By 1990, she had admitted to burning out. She chose to change her focus, working with adolescents in the area of drug use. However, she never entirely gave up on HIV research, volunteerism, or philanthropy.
She is currently the associate director of the Saban Research Institute of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and the director of the Community, Health Outcomes, and Intervention Research (CHOIR) Program at CHLA. CHOIR was established to promote the health and well-being of children, adolescents, and families through prevention, health promotion, health services, and health outcomes research.
A project at CHOIR is the Healthy Young Men’s Study, a five-year longitudinal research project that will track an ethnically diverse group of 526 young men who have sex with men. All of the young men fall between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Michelle Kipke, along with a remarkable staff that includes George Weiss and Julie Carpineto, work on this study which hopes to better understand how family, friends, and community impacts the choices young men make about their health. This, of course, includes looking into their attitudes and beliefs surrounding HIV. (I sit on the Community Advisory Board.)
After twenty years of AIDS work, Michelle Kipke has learned a few things about surviving in this field. She turns to physical activity to relieve stress. She says, “I run a lot these days. Every other day, if not every day. I just need to get the physical relief.” She turns to music. “I also play the cello when life is not entirely crazy.”
For anyone hoping to sustain a career in HIV, Michelle has this to say: “Pace yourself! This epidemic is not going away and if you want to be there for the long haul, you need to pace yourself.” In addition to her work in AIDS, Michelle is a professor at the University of Southern California and is raising a family. She adds, “Make sure you always find balance in your life...work can not be more important than other things like friends, family or a good movie.”
Noël Alumit wrote the novel Letters to Montgomery Clift; Talking to the Moon, his second novel, came out in February 2007. He has been published in USA Today, The Advocate, OutTraveler, and others. He works for the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) and maintains a literary blog:
It's All About Pacing
Dedicated to Adolescent Health, Michelle Kipke Talks About What It Takes to Run that Extra Mile.
From the Trenches by Noël Alumit?
Michelle Kipke, a twenty-year veteran in the AIDS fight, knew she was different. She says, “My childhood was spent feeling very out of step with the world around me.” She was raised by a single mom in an affluent area of Los Angeles surrounded by “God-fearing, judgmental adults.” When she was a teenager, she came out as a lesbian and, according to Ms. Kipke, “wanted to pursue causes of social justice rather than a high-paying, corporate job. That really made me feel different.”
When she turned eighteen, she went to college. “I ran as fast and as far away as possible—New York City! I did my undergrad studies at New York University. It took a while to get used to the fast pace of New York City. I came to love it and very much became a New Yorker! I continued mygraduate studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine/Yeshiva University in the Bronx, in a PhD program in Experimental/Health Psychology.”
Being in New York in the 1980s provided Michelle with an interesting vantage point. “I was at school in the Bronx from 1984 to 1989, and that was precisely the time when the AIDS epidemic crashed upon us in New York. I recall when there were still just thirteen cases, and then, within nine months, it seemed like everyone was dying. I recall sitting in a room of gay psychologists with the majority coughing with pneumocystis or covered with KS lesions. It was everywhere and by 1985 I had lost three very close friends.”
She found that her true calling was working in adolescent health and development. She notes, “My entire professional career has been spent, one way or another, trying to figure out how to keep adolescents and young adults healthy.” She worked for the first Adolescent AIDS Program at Montefiore Medical Center dealing with HIV-infected teens. “I ended up developing the first HIV prevention intervention developed for and evaluated with adolescents. I also held some of the first adolescents to die of AIDS. It all felt—as it still does—like such a horrible loss.”
One can imagine how working with HIV and adolescents can be devastating.
“The first few years in N.Y. were very difficult,” says Michelle. “I watched so many children die alone, without family to comfort them, in large part because they were gay.”
By 1990, she had admitted to burning out. She chose to change her focus, working with adolescents in the area of drug use. However, she never entirely gave up on HIV research, volunteerism, or philanthropy.
She is currently the associate director of the Saban Research Institute of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and the director of the Community, Health Outcomes, and Intervention Research (CHOIR) Program at CHLA. CHOIR was established to promote the health and well-being of children, adolescents, and families through prevention, health promotion, health services, and health outcomes research.
A project at CHOIR is the Healthy Young Men’s Study, a five-year longitudinal research project that will track an ethnically diverse group of 526 young men who have sex with men. All of the young men fall between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Michelle Kipke, along with a remarkable staff that includes George Weiss and Julie Carpineto, work on this study which hopes to better understand how family, friends, and community impacts the choices young men make about their health. This, of course, includes looking into their attitudes and beliefs surrounding HIV. (I sit on the Community Advisory Board.)
After twenty years of AIDS work, Michelle Kipke has learned a few things about surviving in this field. She turns to physical activity to relieve stress. She says, “I run a lot these days. Every other day, if not every day. I just need to get the physical relief.” She turns to music. “I also play the cello when life is not entirely crazy.”
For anyone hoping to sustain a career in HIV, Michelle has this to say: “Pace yourself! This epidemic is not going away and if you want to be there for the long haul, you need to pace yourself.” In addition to her work in AIDS, Michelle is a professor at the University of Southern California and is raising a family. She adds, “Make sure you always find balance in your life...work can not be more important than other things like friends, family or a good movie.”
Noël Alumit wrote the novel Letters to Montgomery Clift; Talking to the Moon, his second novel, came out in February 2007. He has been published in USA Today, The Advocate, OutTraveler, and others. He works for the Asian Pacific AIDS Intervention Team (APAIT) and maintains a literary blog: http://thelastnoel.blogspot.com/.
March 2007 .
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