SPC President’s Message

Greetings SER Students and Postdocs! The 2021 SER Annual Meeting is fast approaching! Registration is now open for the conference as well as the pre-conference workshops. New this year, for each workshop instructors have noted the target audience, and they are staggered in time through August to ensure attendees can participate in multiple workshops if they so desire. The conference program is also available online, so all you type A planners out there can begin plotting your course immediately. In the weeks leading up to the Annual Meeting, the Student and Postdoc Committee (SPC) is organizing several short meet-and-greets. You can check out the topics and register here. Log in for a short break and get to know your future epi colleagues and friends.

In other news, I would like to highlight some results from our 2020 SPC survey provided by Internal Affairs Chair Rebecca Barry. Top reported reasons for SER membership were to submit an abstract, to receive a member discount, and to gain additional methods training, with 63% paying for membership out of pocket. The majority (54%) of respondents attended the 2020 meeting, with the biggest reason for not attending being lack of funds (62%). For the 2021 meeting, there was high interest expressed for social events, an early career panel, and the job fair. Less than half of respondents reported attending other SPC-sponsored virtual events including SERDigital (45%) and journal clubs (18%), though we got a lot of fantastic recommendations for future journal club topics! Survey respondents were mostly doctoral-level students (41%) followed by postdocs (33%) and master’s students (13%), were in their late 20s to early 40s, majority white (67%) and women (76.5%). Thanks to everyone who participated, as we will use these survey results to improve our outreach and programming.

I also have some very exciting SPC leadership news to share. We have elected a new SPC President-Elect, Dr. Sharia Ahmed. This will be my final message and meeting as the SPC President, with the fantastic Dr. John Pamplin taking over following the June meeting. I’d like to sincerely thank our SPC members who have worked tirelessly (during a pandemic nonetheless!) to plan targeted activities for the annual meeting, organize seminars and journal clubs, design and implement our SPC survey, and stay connected with the membership through social media.

Looking forward to “seeing” everyone on June 22.

Catherine Lerro
SER SPC President