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Alright Students and Postdocs, it’s time to start gearing up for SER submission season! Yes, the Annual Meeting is half a year away. Yes, there are midterms and finals and projects that need your attention. But whatever you’re able to do now is going to set up your SER experience for next year. So here we go (*cracks knuckles*). SUBMIT AN ABSTRACT. Abstracts are due the MORNING of January 13th (or earlier, see #2). Given how long it takes to do an analysis, write an abstract, get feedback from coauthors, and make appropriate edits, NOW is the time to start working on these. https://epiresearch.org/annual-meeting/2023-meeting/abstract-submission/ APPLY FOR TRAVEL SCHOLARSHIPS. These are due December 9th, and they require you to have ALREADY submitted an abstract. This is real money that SER awards to real students and postdocs to help you get to the Annual Meeting. Also be sure to ask your advisors and check with your graduate schools etc. for additional funding options. There is often internal support for academic conferences, and those will have their own deadlines. https://epiresearch.org/annual-meeting/awards/spc-travel-scholarships/ STUDENT DISSERTATION WORKSHOP. Applications are due February 3rd. This program is specifically geared towards epidemiology doctoral students MIDWAY through their training. SER pays […]

I continue to bask in the afterglow of the 2022 annual meeting, our first in-person meeting since our last in 2019. I hope you do too. By many accounts, it was a successful meeting. We reconnected with friends, mentors, mentees, and collaborators in person as responsibly as we could, given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you all for making the annual meeting safe, memorable, and edifying. Nonetheless, we must recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic prevented some members from joining our yearly in-person meeting. The executive committee is looking into making our events and programs through the year as accessible to all as feasible and affordable. Not to put too much pressure on us, but we face the unfinished challenge of COVID-19, which is now worsened by new threats from monkeypox and poliomyelitis. Furthermore, we must deal with deteriorating reproductive health rights in the US, climate change threats to our health, homophobia, transphobia, racism, violent policing, disinformation, misinformation, social disorder, and wars. These threats often intersect to affect the most vulnerable among us. To make matters worse, parts of society are increasingly at odds with science and the work of epidemiologists and other scientists. Our work has become more complicated. From […]

Hello SER friends! I am thrilled that our annual meeting is just around the corner in Chicago – June 14-17, 2022. I look forward to seeing all of you in person. The SER Executive Committee has been working hard to put together an interesting and thought-provoking program. We have some fantastic plenary speakers: Dr. Zeynep Tufekci who will share her perspectives on the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Michael Mina who will discuss SARS-CoV-2 testing, and Dr. Joseph L. Graves who will provide critical perspectives on race, ancestry, genetics and disease. We will be honoring an impressive set of SER award winners. It is not too late to register – if you are starting to feel some FOMO, join us. For those who are unable to attend in person due to health or other considerations, I look forward to catching up with you in the future. We apologize that we are unable to offer a hybrid option for this 2022 annual meeting – the logistics, costs, and hotel obligations unfortunately made this impossible. We have been closely watching the pandemic conditions, and just updated the conference safety protocol on June 1, 2022. Due to high rates and transmissibility of the circulating variants […]

It’s June, which means it’s time for my final entry into the livejournal colloquially known as the SPC President’s address! That’s right, in a few short weeks, I will be relinquishing the reigns of the SPC and riding off into the sunset into the SPC Past President position (or as I like to call it, SPC President Emeritus). Fortunately, the SPC will be in great hands with Sharia Ahmed taking over the show. I’d like to thank Sharia and all the other members of the SPC board for all of their hard work this year. And though I will be remaining on the board in a different role, I’d like to give a special shoutout to those members rotating off: Nedghie Adrien, Jen Mongiovi, Alvin Thomas, and Matt Mietchen. If you happen to come across any of them at the annual meeting, please join me in letting them know how much we appreciate them for all of their efforts these last two (challenging) years. Speaking of the annual meeting, I am so excited because as I sit here writing this, I just received the best gift in the mail today. That’s right, my SER-provided covid test has arrived, which means […]

Spring is in the air, and at SER we are busy with the annual meeting and elections! I hope you are all managing things reasonably well through ongoing changes in the pandemic and public health guidance. I am experiencing some whiplash myself with the rapid recent changes, but taking lots of deep breaths and trying stay flexible. I am so thrilled for our upcoming annual meeting in Chicago! I have missed connecting with all of you in person so much these past years. I would like to call your attention to our esteemed plenary speakers to give you a preview of some of the exciting presentations you can anticipate at the meeting. Wednesday, June 15 Plenary I invited Dr. Zeynep Tufekci because I thought we would benefit greatly from her perspectives on the Covid-19 pandemic – particularly how science, politics, and social media intersected in impacting the onset and course of the pandemic and how the US handled the pandemic. Dr. Tufekci’s experience engaging on this as a sociologist, drawing on her prior experience with SARS and Ebola, as well as her perspectives on assumptions that were made about human behavior (e.g., regarding masking), will be valuable and enlightening for […]

Hello again fellow SPCers! Spring is here!! Sure that may mean taking and/or grading midterms for some, and perhaps your sleep cycle was thrown out of wack by an abrupt springing forward of the clocks, but for many of us it also means emerging from winter hibernation, flowers, and daylight past 5pm – I’ll take that trade. And of course, Spring is an exciting time for SER members as well. Many of you tuned in past month for our Spring SERdigital, which featured Dr. Ana Diez Roux and Dr. Mya L. Roberson speaking on, “Health disparities research in epidemiology: present and future directions”. Both speakers were absolutely fantastic, so a huge thank you to both of them, as well as a big thanks to our SPC education co-chairs, Jen Mongiovi and Andreas Teferra, for organizing! We are also really excited for our next SERjournal club which we are co-sponsoring with the SPER Student Committee, where Dr. Ashley Hill will discuss her article, “Chlamydia trachomatis is associated with medically indicated preterm birth and preeclampsia in young pregnant women”. That will take place on April 20th at noon, so make sure you register for that here. I can’t talk about exciting things […]

Greetings to all of you in the SER community. Each time I have settled in to write one of these messages, pandemic conditions have been drastically different. With the Omicron variant tearing through the world, things feel more unstable and uncertain than they have in a while. University teaching plans are shifting rapidly with reassurance only that we need to remain flexible to further changes. K-12 schools seem to be tenuously clinging to staying open, calling various closure days due to sick staff, need for testing, or a deep cleaning, but largely resisting a complete shift to remote learning thus far. But with every new message from my daughter’s school, I panic, worried the title will be “Covid is everywhere and we are closing.” So many families I know with small children have lost any sort of stability in their child care situation, and these most valuable and vulnerable members of our human community are home as office mates. It is truly impossible to work and care for an infant, toddler or preschooler at the same time. For those in this situation, I am thinking of you and wishing there were better support or solutions. The SER executive committee was […]