Time to provide an update on Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations (HPAIR) 2015 that took place from the 20 – 24 August 2015 in Manila, Philippines. As mentioned in a previous blog entry, I was invited to speak on the topic “Encouraging Healthy Behavior – The Role of Public Health and Social Media“, under the Health and Social Policy Panel, scheduled on the 22 August 2015.
The format adopted for the panel was one where each speaker (Kate Liebelt, Pradeep Ray, Ted Herbosa and myself) presented their perspectives on Health and Social Media, followed by an interactive discussion with the audience. If I have to use one word to describe what happened, it would be “awesome“! Of course, one can say that this is to be expected since it is a Harvard event 🙂
The quality of the speakers were top notch – this is evident not only from the content presented but also the contextual application of the content. The audience were fantastic, in the sense that they were not only interactive (a phenomenon not common in Asia) but the questions they posed were obviously not something they threw out randomly. Personally, I felt that I benefited from the discussion because of the quality of the conversation we had and I sincerely hope the audience felt the same way too.
In addition to our panel, I also attended (briefly) other panels and sessions (the conference’s agenda covered a number of interesting themes), my only regret was not having the luxury of time to attend every session possible, there were some topics that really my attention :). Of course, I would also like to thank the moderator of our panel – Thomas Wang as well as the associate – Fatuma Rinderknecht (both from Harvard) for making this happen.
All in all, it was an awesome conference experience, kudos to Harvard for organizing this and I wish HPAIR all the best for their 2016 Asia Conference.
BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 