President’s Corner – Carolyn Drews-Botsch
This is an exciting year for SPER as we gather for the 30th time. In honor of this occasion we have been able, at minimal cost, to add to our meeting so that there will be a full two days of activities. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of SER – so we expect that this year’s conference will be particularly exciting and intellectually stimulating – all in the beautiful Northwest with spectacular views and interesting cultural diversity.
The Executive Committee has been hard at work putting all the details together for the meeting, which truly takes a village. You can get more information about the meeting in this newsletter and on our web-site, but here are some highlights.
– The pre-conference Advanced Methods Workshops will take place Monday morning, June 19th, from 9:00am until 12:00pm. This year’s workshop will cover sensitivity analyses for missing data and causal inference.
– The meeting will officially start at 2:00pm on Monday afternoon with a panel discussion highlighting 30 years of innovation in pediatric and perinatal epidemiology and feature six of our previous student prize winners.
– Tuesday, June 20th, will feature our keynote address by Fred Rivara, the Seattle Children’s Guild Endowed Chair in Pediatrics, Professor of Pediatrics, and editor-in-chief of JAMA Pediatrics. He will talk about youth violence and the epidemiology of firearm injuries, as well as how this scientific work has been politicized. I am excited about the opportunity to focus on injuries as the leading killer of our youth and about how we navigate the political climate that often surrounds our work.
– Round Table discussions will occur from 7:00-8:00am Tuesday.
– We are also continuing our new tradition of speed posters. By expanding the meeting and adding two speed poster sessions we have been able to greatly expand the number of podium presentations selected from submitted abstracts.
– We are also continuing our new tradition of highlighting the work of our trainees by selecting poster prizes from the work presented by our trainees.
– The business meeting starts immediately after the scientific sessions on Tuesday afternoon. This year we have a number of important topics to consider at this meeting including formalizing our relationship with Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiology. Please attend! The continued health of SPER absolutely depends on your involvement.
I also want to say thank you to many people: our Executive Committee for their steadfast commitment to keeping things running smoothly, Sue Bevan for graciously and seamlessly handling so many of our administrative tasks, everyone who submitted or co-authored or reviewed an abstract, everyone who ran for Office, everyone who submitted an application or sponsored someone for one of our Awards, and our Student Representative, Sarah Pugh, who has organized the Advanced Methods Workshop. This is our village!
See you in Seattle! – Carey