SERnews

Hello Students, Postdocs, and other Early Career Epidemiologists! The 2024-2025 Student-Postdoc Committee (SPC) has been hard at work over the past few months. We hosted a very well attended event on NIH pre- and post-doctoral grant applications (F and K awards). Many thanks to our speakers Drs. Maria Glymour, Katrina Kezios, and Sirena Gutierrez. The next SERpresents event will be November 13, 2024, on the topic of “Quasi-experimental approaches in Epidemiology.” Looking forward, I encourage everyone to consider submitting a Mid-Year Meeting abstract by November 15, 2024. The virtual format reduces burden on presenters. If you need some inspiration, I recommend the new Descriptive Epidemiology SERplaylist put together by Kate LeMasters and Lauren Zalla (https://epiresearch.org/2024/08/05/descriptive-epidemiology/). Everyone should keep some space on your calendar between February 10-14, 2025, and expect amazing symposia and abstract speakers on a diverse range of topics during the SER Mid-year Meeting. Finally, I want to thank the members of the 2024-2025 SPC board for their early work and commitment to making SER a wonderful community for students, postdocs, and early career epidemiologists. Nedghie Adrien is now the Past President and Anthony Nixon will serve as President Elect. The education co-chairs are Lisha Lin and Xuexin Yu. […]

Happy September, SER! I want to begin by thanking you all for entrusting me to lead this amazing organization.  SER has been an important part of my professional life, and it is truly the honor of my life to serve as your President. I look forward to the work ahead. A big shout out to our Texas members for welcoming us all to Austin last June.  And what an impressive meeting it was! Over 1,300 attendees participated in over 20 workshops, 24 symposia, and numerous oral abstract sessions, lunchtime discussions, and professional development sessions.   In true SER fashion, there was something for everyone. As SER President and a native Bostonian, it will be my pleasure to welcome SER back to my hometown.  The 2025 meeting will be the “reschedule” of the Boston 2020 meeting up-ended by the pandemic, and will be the fourth convening in Boston (previous meetings were held in 1996, 2007 and 2013).  For those who’ve never been, Boston holds a unique place in U.S. history.  Known as the “birthplace of the American Revolution”, Boston is home to the country’s oldest school (Boston Latin School, est. 1635); the oldest health department (once led by a local guy named […]

It’s June! And June means that it’s time for the annual meeting. We have a great meeting planned. From the plenaries to the symposia to the oral sessions to the posters, the program promises to be engaging and educational. Our collective efforts to improve human health as epidemiologists are impressive. If you’re presenting at SER, and especially if you’re presenting for the first time, take some time to review the presentation I recorded to help people present more effectively. You can find the presentation here: https://epiresearch.org/2024/05/22/serpresents-short-talks-long-talks-job-talks-lets-talk-about-giving-talks/ This year, our meeting falls on Juneteenth. Fundamentally, Juneteenth is a celebration of freedom. During the meeting, we will share about Juneteenth to inform and test your knowledge. See how you do with the quiz questions and then take the time to learn from the quiz answers. We hope that everyone will find this activity worthwhile. Looking for another way to honor Juneteenth? Join in the SER 5k run or 1 mile walk. And if you’re up to it, extend the walk a little further to 2.5 miles. Or maybe walk that 2.5 mile walk sometime later in the day on June 19. Why 2.5 miles? The 2.5 miles represents the time from the […]

Students and Postdocs! Welcome to 2024! I hope you had a healthy and restorative winter break and are ready to leap into the new year (I could not help the pun. I hope you will either appreciate it or groan mildly). I was reading over our past-president (Sharia Ahmed)’s words from last year, and if she’ll allow me, I’d like to borrow quite a few. Sharia very eloquently wrote about self-care and mental health, and I want to echo those sentiments. Graduate training is hard! For a myriad of reasons, some less tangible than others, which makes them all the more frustrating to navigate. And the challenges of graduate training, establishing your career are happening in conjunction with personal and social stuff. Life doesn’t stop because you’re in graduate school. And at times, being a graduate student contributes to the challenges. We can be honest about the financial difficulties associated with living on a PhD stipend and being unable to contribute to retirement savings while peers in the labor workforce forge ahead. Add to that living in a particular geo-political context (remember trying to navigate graduate school at the beginning of 2020?)! I say all of this to emphasize that… […]

February is here and that means that our Mid-Year Meeting at the University of Toronto is only one month away and we’ll be in Austin for our annual meeting in just four months. That’s hard for me to believe. Our times to be together are right around the corner! The Mid-Year Meeting in Toronto is co-chaired by Drs. Hailey Banack, Laura Rosella, and Jess Edwards, so you know that the program is going to be outstanding. The keynotes will be Dr. Magda Cerda in the morning and Dr. Irene Chen in the afternoon—I’m sure both are going to be great. The Mid-Year Meeting is a hybrid meeting, so you’re able to enjoy it in person or remotely. If you go in person, please join the group for a reception the evening before on campus. In person registration is only $115 for non-students and $50 for students; virtual attendance is free. The SER Annual Meeting is coming up on us quickly. Registration is open now. On Juneteenth, Dr. Amy Fairchild will give the keynote, tentatively titled “The Backlash Next Time: Public Health in Reactionary Social and Academic Environments”, followed on June 20 with Dr. Chandra Ford, speaking on “A Cornerstone, a […]

I hope this finds you all well!  We had a successful SER-SPC Business Meeting in Minneapolis in June and are looking forward to the year ahead.  We have many exciting events and opportunities to become involved with SPC. We continue our SPC Career Development Webinar Series this fall with the topic, “Grant writing and opportunities for early career epidemiologists.”  Please register if you would like to attend this one-hour webinar at noon on 11-September.  Please also join us for the next online SPC Journal Club on 16-October. We are now accepting abstracts for the 2019 Fall SERdigital conference to be held at noon on 13-November.  This semi-annual web meeting is in the format of a debate between two leading epidemiologists and has three live oral presentations selected from abstracts submitted by students and postdocs.  The student/postdoc abstract winners will be selected to present their work live on our interactive digital conference and will also receive complimentary registration to the 2020 SER annual meeting.  Abstracts are due on 13-September-2019 and can be submitted on the SER website.  The topic for the November 2019 meeting is “Are Epidemiologists Scientists or Public Health Practioners?”  Mary Bassett (Harvard) and David Savitz (Brown) will debate […]

I’m so honored to serve SER as President this year.  I’m awed by the number of members who work mostly behind the scenes to make the Society a hub of learning, teaching, and collaboration.  The shaping of SER meetings (note the plural) in 2020 are already underway.  On Friday, March 6, 2020, our first SER Mid-Year meeting will feature Keynote Speaker Sonia Hernandez-Diaz and two symposia.  To increase accessibility, it will be a live web-conference at no cost to SER members.  The SER Board will meet at the end of this month to review symposium proposals for both the Mid-Year and the regular June meetings. It’s official: SER is growing!  Although numbers had increased at the last few SER meetings, we weren’t ready to claim this as real growth because attendance depends to a certain extent on venue.  When we last met in Minneapolis in 2012, 714 people attended; this year, we had 1147 attendees.  Thankfully, our venue for SER 2020 in Boston has larger meeting rooms to accommodate our increasing numbers. I’d like to share with you a slide presented by Professor Shawnita Sealey-Jefferson at SER 2019.  I know I wasn’t the only one in the room that was […]

Hello SPC members, Hope your school year finished up well, and that you are gearing up for an exciting SER Annual Meeting in Baltimore from June 19-22. It’s not too late to book your trip to the annual meeting, and SPC members receive discounted meeting registration! We are looking forward to seeing great research featured in the oral and poster sessions from our SPC members. The SPC is also holding a number of events that we hope you will be able to attend at the meeting: Speed Mentor Networking, Wednesday, June 20, 7:00 – 7:45 AM SER Student and Faculty Recruitment Fair, Wednesday, June 20, 12:00 – 1:00 PM SPC Business Meeting, Wednesday, June 20, 6:00 – 7:00 PM SPC Happy Hour, Wednesday, June 20, 7:00 PM Breakfast with the Experts, Thursday, June 21, 7:00 – 8:00 AM SPC Career Panel, Thursday, June 21, 12:00 – 1:00 PM Who wants to be an Epidemiologist?, Thursday, June 21, 12:00 – 1:00 PM You can find more details on all of these events here: https://epiresearch.org/annual-meeting/2018-meeting/student-and-postdoc-meeting-events/ Please note that the Speed Mentor Networking and Breakfast with the Experts events require advance registration, which is available at the above link. If you recently attended […]

Andrew Olshan SER President Happy spring!  As I have mentioned before, there are multiple new SER activities underway.  I would like to call your attention to a new online initiative, called SER Forum. This venue will allow SER members can help each other answer questions that come up in our daily work around substantive and methodological topics in epidemiology.   SER members may post questions online, and other members of SER will be contacted to provide a response to the question. The intent is for the questions to be specific and focused enough to be answerable in short paragraphs. Questions can focus on issues related to study design, sampling, measurement, causal inference, data analysis, or research area topics, among others. Responses will be provided within 5 days of the question being posted.  The SER Forum can be found with the SERlibrary dropdown menu from the main SER webpage. We hope this forum will serve as a space where epidemiologists may help each other improve the study and practice of epidemiology. See you in Baltimore in just over a month! As always feel free to send any comments and suggestions about the society to me at andy_olshan@unc.edu