I want to extend a very warm welcome to Emily Coles, our new Program Manager at DHF:
http://www.tudiabetes.org/profile/Emily114
We are very fortunate to have found her to join our team. I want to let her introduce herself to the community and say a big...
WELCOME!!!!
Welcome, Emily!
Welcome to the big family Emily!
Welcome to the family Emily, looking forward to getting to know you.
Ballroom dancing, sheesh! Out of the realm of possibility for me LOL
Welcome, may tudiabetes become your second family!
Welcome.
Nice to meet you. Sorry I missed your blogs. They look interesting too. I don’t check the blogs out enough. It’s great to hear that the “business” of TuDiabetes is growing!
Willkommen to the DHF, Emily!
Hi TuDiabetes community! Thanks so much for the warm welcome! I’m absolutely thrilled to be here, and for those of you who have not checked out my profile page, here’s a bit about me:
I’m originally from Pennsylvania, but have lived in San Francisco since 1996, and consider it home now.
I was diagnosed with type I diabetes in 1978, when there was no structured way for people with diabetes to connect. My parents tracked down another family with a diabetic child my age, and every few months we would drive 2 hours to visit them so that I could have a “peer”. And do you know what? I did not like that kid AT ALL. But she was my entire diabetic peer group up until I went to college, so there we were.
Look how different it is to have diabetes now! Bye-bye, rotten kid. Now I’ve got thousands of potential diabetic friends to share with, all right here.
In college I studied biology and considered going into medicine, but opted for “life experience” before making such a commitment. In 1996 I moved to San Francisco and made my way into public health, by way of much volunteering and networking. At the time there was strong focus on HIV/AIDS-related work in SF, and I became a research assistant in the SF AIDS Office within the Public Health Department. Soon thereafter I decided to go back to school for epidemiology in order to progress into a career studying infectious disease, which I did in 2000, at Stanford University.
Epidemiology turned out not to be quite the right fit for me. I got the degree, but the actual work was too solitary. Lots of numerical data, not much human interaction.
… So of course the logical next step was to become a ballroom dance teacher. ALL human interaction! I worked for a dance studio from 2005 to 2008, and then for myself from 2008 to the present. I love it, and I still teach, perform and compete in ballroom dance to this day.
All through this story I still had diabetes, of course, and it has always been a main theme in my life, even as I’ve tried to focus my attention elsewhere. In 2010 I decided to go ahead and DO something with it. That decision eventually led me to DHF, and I could not be more thrilled that it did! My position here combines perfectly my passion for public health and advocacy, my love of personal human contact, and my long- and hard-earned knowledge of diabetes.
Please feel free to share any questions or feedback you have for me 
Ok Emily, I’m late but WELCOME!!!
Welcome! I too know what it feels like to have no one to share my D experiences with but with the invention of computers I have met people all over the world who share our disease.