Suzanne Bevan

What sparked your decision to become an epidemiologist? I pursued an MPH in epidemiology because I was interested in learning about public health broadly, and I fell in love with epi methods coursework! As a student researcher and data analyst, I then had the opportunity to work with incredible mentors and learn more about social and lifecourse epidemiology, which led me to realize that I wanted to become a social epidemiologist. Do you have any pets? I have a grey house cat with adorable socks named Theo. He loves cuddles and poking holes in my shirts (to be fair, I provoke him). Why did you join SER? What keeps you coming back? I joined SER because my mentor encouraged me to. But I keep coming back because I have found the annual meetings to be incredibly supportive of student work and I very much look forward to hearing about the research being done by the field more broadly.   What advice do you give students who want to become epidemiologists? You can take an epidemiology degree in many different directions, and it can be as interdisciplinary as you’d like it to be. I love that our field spans governmental and […]

What sparked your decision to become an epidemiologist? In college, I was a Biology major and conducted laboratory-based research in infectious diseases. However, having grown up in Nepal, I was always attracted to the idea of global public health, without fully understanding the diversity of career options available in public health. I was fortunate to take an epidemiology class and knew that was exactly my field. I then chose a graduate school where I could get advanced training in both lab-based microbiology/immunology as well as epidemiology, and have since focused on global epidemiology studies that often incorporates lab-based variables (e.g. microbiome, inflammation). What do you see as the biggest obstacle facing epidemiologists in the next five years? While the increasing collaboration between experts from different fields in recent times have been exciting, I think one major challenge will be how to manage these collaborations. For example, in my own research area, there is often collaboration between epidemiologists, clinicians, biostatisticians, lab scientists, and bioinformaticians. The epidemiologist is often at the center of these collaborations yet will have limited expertise in these other fields. The challenge will then be to balance learning new skills (e.g. specific skill sets within these other fields […]