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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 […]

Allow me to (hopefully) be the last person to wish you all a happy new year! I hope we are all past the point of accidentally dating things as 2021, and I trust that those of you who made them, are all diligently holding on to your resolutions. There are a lot of exciting things happening in the year ahead, and I look forward to experiencing them all together in the months to come. I want to thank everyone who joined us for last month’s SERjournal club. Dr. Peter Tennant led a great session on his article “Use of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to identify confounders in applied health research: review and recommendations”, and we had well over 100 attendees!  Of course, if you were one of the unfortunate folks who could not attend, members can always catch the recordings on the SER website. (Pro tip: if you have not done so already, now is the time to renew your SER membership to maintain access to all of the amazing online content). And of course, make sure to keep an ear out for updates regarding our next journal club, which will take place on April 20th. New this year, we’re […]

Greetings SER students and postdocs! Can you believe it’s already November? It feels like just yesterday, we were all having a hard time believing that summer was coming to an end. And yet, we have made the transition – we’ve traded in our beach outings for apple picking, exchanged iced tea for apple cider, and we have accepted four months of darkness at 5pm in exchange for one extra hour of sleep on a single Saturday night/Sunday morning (thanks daylight savings!). Anyway, on behalf of the SPC board, we would like to extend a huge thank you to all who attended our SERexperts and SERjournal club events this fall. We’re super excited to wrap up our fall programs with SERdigital on November 10th. Join us as we welcome Dr. Thu Nguyen and Dr. Sandra Albrecht for their session titled, “Infodemic Inoculation – Lessons Learned and Future Directions”. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you register for that here. Yes, we may be deep into fall, but in the words of a famous dragon-conquering epidemiologist, winter is coming! For some of you, this time of year means wrapping up assignments and gearing up for finals. Or maybe you have […]

I hope the fall is proceeding well for all of you in the SER community. Now that I am back on campus, I appreciate the casual interactions, hall conversations, and coffee meet ups with colleagues that were absent when everything was remote. I also worry about how to best protect my health with increased exposure. Outside of work, managing all of the new schedules in my household is a work in progress. I know constant flux and adaptation has become the new normal, but I hope you are all managing this ok and want to acknowledge that it certainly takes a toll. At SER, we are continuing to prepare for the mid-year and annual meetings. There are excellent symposia, breakfast sessions, lunchtime sessions and workshops that will be offered, and we appreciated reading the thoughtful statements in the proposals on how chairs considered diversity in putting together the topic and the speakers. One important part of the SER annual meeting is to honor those in our community who have made outstanding contributions through the eight SER awards. The Marshall Joffe Epidemiologic Methods Research Award has particular poignance this year, due to the untimely passing of Dr. Joffe in October 2021 […]

Greetings to all of the SER students and postdocs out there! I am both thrilled and honored to serve as your SPC president, and I hope you all are as excited for this next year as I am.  I’d like to give a BIG shoutout to Dr. Catherine Lerro for doing an amazing job as SPC President and for showing me the ropes over this last year. Fortunately for me, she’ll be sticking around on the SPC board for one more year. I also want to welcome our new SPC President-elect, Dr. Sharia Ahmed who two months in, is already knocking it out the park! We have a great mix of new and returning SPC board members who are eager to serve the needs of our community, you can learn all about them here. Don’t be afraid to drop us a line and say hello! It’s been a difficult couple of years for everybody, and a really hard time to be a trainee. That’s why there couldn’t be a better time to remind ourselves what it means to be an academic community. The other members of the SPC board and I look forward to providing amazing programming, resources, and the […]

It is hard to believe the fall is upon us. Out here in California, there is a feeling of excitement mixed with anxiety as children return to classrooms with masks, testing, modified quarantine protocols, and a whole range of new approaches in place aimed at keeping them in classrooms despite the pandemic. Cars are covered in ash, the moon is a pale orange at night, and my daughter takes a KN95 with her everywhere, not only in case she goes inside a store but also in case the air quality takes a turn for the worse. This is not the fall I had imagined when I received my vaccine at the FEMA site at the Oakland Coliseum this spring, but this is our reality. On the other hand, I am struck by the continuing stores of flexibility and innovation that we are drawing upon individually and collectively to make things work. I am heartened by our ability to make new social connections even when we can only see each other’s eyes. I hope you are each able to find your way through this complicated time, allowing yourself the space to process both the challenges and the unexpected highlights, and drawing […]