2019 Elections

SER used to be full of presentations on the latest population-based studies in cancer, cardiovascular disease, nutrition and so many other subfields. But these papers seem increasingly to end up now at other disease-focused specialty meetings, leaving us with the one common theme of methods as the interest most broadly shared among the SER membership.  While this might seem a natural response to increasing specialization across biomedical research, I believe that we need to work to keep the meeting rich in substantive as well as statistical presentations, not only to foster greater participation, but also to keep us all abreast of the developments in population health in all the major subfields.  Broadly literate public health experts will be as conversant in genetics, statins, vaccines and neonatal screening as they are with logistic regression and proportional hazards models.  So we need to lure back the talks with real population health content, not only the methods to get us there.  To this end, for example, we’ve organized a symposium on causal inference in genetic epidemiology this year in Minneapolis, luring back a number of lapsed members to educate us all.

Despite having attended these 25 or so SER meetings, I never imagined that I might one day find myself a candidate to be its president.  As my longest and dearest professional affiliation, nothing could be more meaningful to me, and if elected I intend to pursue these next 3 years of service with diligence, passion, and commitment.    I have served on the Executive Committee as a Member-at-Large, and then for another 3-year stint as Chairman of the Education Committee, and in 2017 received SER’s “Excellence in Education” award.  So I know the organization well, and love its quirks and personalities, it’s proudly nerdy subculture, its saints and rebels, and its glorious history of fights, fiascos, and fandangos.  I would carry out the duties of this office with a degree of quaint enthusiasm that at my age I should probably be embarrassed to admit to. 

For the benefit of the voting membership I should lay out the broad outline of my professional qualifications for this position.  My doctorate in Epidemiologic Science was granted by the University of Michigan School of Public Health in 1995, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Loyola Stritch School of Medicine, and then another two years as a hospital epidemiologist in Charlotte, NC.  In 1999 I began a faculty position at University of North Carolina, moving to McGill University in 2009.  I now have affiliations at five Schools of Public Health in Chile, France, Canada and the US, and I am an editor at the journal Epidemiology and an Associate Editor at American Journal of Epidemiology.  I’ve supervised 8 post-doctoral fellows and 26 PhD theses and written a lot of grants and papers.  My scientific interests are broad, but have been mostly focused on social epidemiology and methods. The advantage of an exposure-focused specialization is that it allows one to study a wide array of outcomes, so I’ve worked on both infectious and chronic diseases, in North America and globally. 

I am excited about the field of epidemiology and SER’s role in its professional realization as an organized entity of training, scholarship and scientific activism.  I’d like to see us become less provincial, and expend into the huge and dynamic epidemiology communities of the Caribbean and Central and South America.  Featuring Chile at this year’s meeting is a step in that direction, as was the good Latin American participation we had at the Congress in Miami in 2016, but these are just the first steps and we need to do more to expand our scope and membership internationally.  I’m also concerned about science and our role in the evolution of biomedical research and its application.  The wheels are coming off the old journal publishing model, and it is not yet clear what will replace it.  Too much of the academic professorship is mired in a constant and desperate scramble for external research funding, and students are now  understandably worried about the insecurity of soft-money and the potentially soul-crushing prospect of spending their lives generating an endless stream of unfunded R01 applications.  Schools are pushed to churn out ever greater cohorts of tuition-paying MPH students into uncertain job markets, while policy debates about population health become increasingly disconnected from evidence.  Research practice is changing, with datasets getting bigger and messier, and the rise of machines in model selection, and more data and code are being shared, or should be.  In short, it’s a crazy time in many ways.  Against a backdrop of increasing public health challenges, from antibiotic resistance and climate change to increasing injury mortality from violence and overdose, epidemiology has never been more necessary and important to population health. Yet our professional roles and institutions are fraying under the weight of rapid change.  SER can be an essential caretaker and companion for us in these times of challenge and uncertainty, a place to be continually educated and updated, to be guided by a common community and rejuvenated by the connections with colleagues and friends that enrich our lives and our work.  The annual meeting is our family reunion, the chance to see again our epidemiologic parents, children and brothers and sisters.  I look forward to seeing you all there for many years to come.