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What you will find in this issue:
President's Corner
Student Caucus President's Corner
SER Elections
SER Job Board
SER and Social Media
Symposia
SER at the Congress
SER Travel Scholarships to the Congress
Thank You SER Contributors!
SAVE the DATE - SER Meeting in Minneapolis, June 27-30, 2012
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SER
Membership
The newsletter has been sent either electronically or via US mail
to all SER members, even if they have not renewed their membership
for 2011. However, any future correspondence will be mailed only
to paid SER members. Please contact Jacqueline Brakey with any questions
(Telephone: 801-525-0231; email: membership@epiresearch.org)
SER
Elections
Ballots for this year's SER elections are available online by following
this link. You will need to login to the members only section of the website in order to vote. If you do not know your Member ID and password, email membership@epiresearch.org.
Bios for each candidate are available by clicking on their names.
Nominees for President-Elect:
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Columbia University
Department of Epidemiology
Gelman Professor and Chair
New York, NYDonna Spiegelman, ScD
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
Boston, MA
Nominees for Member-at-Large
Julie Buring, Sc.D.
Professor of Medicine
Harvard Medical School
Division of Preventative Medicine
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Boston, MASteve Cole, MPH, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology
UNC-Chapel Hill
Gillings School of Global Public Health
Chapel Hill, NCMiguel Hernan, Sc.M, Dr.PH
Harvard School of Public Health
Department of Epidemiology
Boston, MAJ. Michael Oakes, PhD
Associate Professor of Epidemiology
University of Minnesota
Division of Epidemiology and Community Health
Minneapolis, MN
Please vote for one candidate for president and TWO candidates for member at large. Your ballots must be submitted by May 23rd to be counted. The election results will be announced at the Meeting in Montreal. **Again this year, SER will randomly select 3 individuals who vote in the annual election to receive a FREE SER membership for 2012.***
Congress of Epidemiology -
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Visit SER at the Congress! Come visit SER's EXHIBITOR BOOTH during the 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology
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Pick up details on theThe Congress will be held June 21(eve) - 24, 2011. The meeting and accommodations will be held at the Le Centre Sheraton in Montreal. Go to http://www.epicongress2011.org to find out more about the Congress.
The Congress will open each morning session of the three-day meeting with a plenary session. The following individuals will be presenting during those sessions:
- Patricia Buffler, University of California, at Berkeley
- Ward Cates, FHI
- John Frank, Medical Research Council
- Muin Khoury, Office of Public Health Genomics, CDC
- Jonathan Samet, University of Southern California
- Allen Wilcox, National Institutes of Health, NIEHS
We schedule sessions carefully to avoid conflicts to the extent possible and to balance the distribution of topics across the meeting, but we are unable to provide schedule preferences. Please make sure that you have an alternate presenter in case you are unable to participate in the session assigned to you..
Preliminary
Program
Again this year the preliminary program will be available online for
you to view. You can see the up-to-date preliminary
program anytime. If you do not have access to the web you
may call 801-587-9120 and request a copy. The preliminary program will be available in mid-April on the Congress website. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open this file.
Student/Post-Doc Activites at the Congress
Activities include Breakfast with the Experts roundtables, Poster Tours, a student welcome reception and several lunchtime sessions. Follow this link to view a complete list of student/post-doc programs at the Congress.
Spotlight
Sessions & Symposia
A total of more than 30 Spotlight Sessions and 30 Symposia will be presented at the Congress. These sessions are organized and moderated by experienced
epidemiologists. Follow this link to view the Spotlight and Symposia session titles and session chairs.
Led by members of the 2011 Congress Faculty, the roundtable discussions will be a popular event. Although the tickets are complimentary, there are only ten available per table. Tickets will be available beginning Tuesday, June 21st at 6:00 pm. on a first-come, first-served basis. We will not be accepting pre-registration for roundtables this year. A list of roundtables will be available coming soon...
The meeting will begin with the first poster session on the evening of June 21st. Posters are a primary venue for presentation of the meeting’s highest quality research findings. . A panel of judges will select the three best student posters from each session. Winners will be publicly recognized during the poster session and receive a gift certificate from Oxford University Press.
Pre- and Post- Meeting Workshops
Visit the Congress website to view a list of workshops being offered. Follow this link.
SER's future meetings:
- 2011 - Montreal, QC (June 21-24) - CONGRESS
- 2012 - Minneapolis, MN (June 27-30)
- 2013 - Boston, MA (June 18-21)
- 2014 - Seattle, WA (tentative)
In a continuing effort to enhance benefits of membership for SER, we have developed the first phase of an online Job Board. The Job Board went live in early fall of 2010. Now out of the beta phase, we are encouraging SER members to submit job opportunities to this Job Board and also use it in your job search.
Members of SER can access the Job Board by logging in to the members only section of the SER website. If you don't know your member id and password, you can contact Jacqueline Brakey (membership@epiresearch.org) to get that information. Please be aware that more and more items are being added to the members only section of the SER website, so put that access information somewhere you can get to it!
Additionally, beginning in early April, organizations/ individuals outside of SER can submit job postings to the Job Board. Viewing the jobs submitted will remain exclusively as a membership benefit. If your organization has a job opportunity that would be of interest to the membership of SER, please go to http://www.epiresearch.org/jobboard beginning in early April to submit that to our Job Board.
In the coming months, we will continue to make enhancements to the job board, including better search options, wider array of job categories, etc.
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Jay Kaufman McGill University |
The SER annual meetings provide several different types of scientific presentation formats, including poster sessions, round tables, plenary sessions, spotlight sessions and symposia. Symposia are sessions of 90 minutes organized around a specific topic, with 3 to 5 invited speakers, one of whom may often be a discussant. Symposia differ from spotlight sessions in that the latter are talks organized around a theme, but drawn from submitted abstracts. For symposia, on the other hand, the organizer contacts potential speakers and recruits them to the session. In some cases, such as for experts outside of epidemiology who would not normally attend the SER meeting, the organization provides some subsidy
for the invited speakers' travel and expenses. The symposia are selected each year by the SER governing council, with an eye toward the quality and creativity of the proposal, as well as an effort to provide representation from diverse epidemiologic subfields. Individuals who wish to organize symposia respond to a call for submissions, usually issued early in the calendar year, and submit their proposals for consideration. The organizers are then selected in March or April, and have a few months after notification
of the selection to finalize the speaker list and talk titles.
For the 2011 meeting in Montreal, the Epidemiology Congress includes multiple North American organizations, each of which will organize some symposia. Therefore, the usual slate of symposia will not be offered this year by SER, which can instead only sponsor two. Other symposium proposals are submitted directly to the Congress organizing committee this year, and will be selected through a different process. The two SER-sponsored symposia for 2011 will be "Epidemiologic Methods are Useless: They Only Give you Answers" (Miguel Hernan and Jay Kaufman) and "Beyond Brenner: Pursuing a New Understanding of the Impact of Macroeconomics Fluctuations on Population Health" (Lisa M Bates and Sandro Galea). Both touch on timely topics and involve presentations by invited panelists who are both exceptional scientists and engaging speakers. Additionally, the first of these symposia is co-sponsored by the journal "Epidemiology", whose editors organize a symposium at SER every year. These talks are then edited and reproduced as essays in the print edition of the journal.
SER and Social Media
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Ann Geiger Wake Forest University |
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Your SER Executive Committee and staff often discuss what member benefits can be offered while maintaining the fiscal health of the organization. Of late these conversations have included the possibility of expanding the content of the newsletter and the SER internet presence. This brief review of social media represents an initial offering in both areas. We are interested in your general feedback on these possible expansions and offer specific questions for your consideration at the end of this article.
The term "social media" has come to represent a broad array of web -based applications that disseminate information in a manner substantially different from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and television.
Whereas traditional media content is generated by highly centralized and hierarchical organizations with substantial budgets, social media content comes from individuals and loosely affiliated groups with limited financial resources. Social media outlets also feature interactive formats promoting connections between individuals and groups. While SER relies heavily on our web page and email to communicate with members, our approach mirrors the traditional media's one way flow of information and does not facilitate member interaction.
"Who is using it?" is a common question about social media, with access representing the first part of the question. The SER Executive Committee is fairly confident that the vast majority of members possess the necessary access through their workplace and quite possibly at home. For those interested in using social media for research, it is worth noting that an estimated 80% of US homes possess internet access of high enough quality to support social media. However, access remains lower among households led by individuals who are Spanish speakers, of Black race, have less formal education, and live in rural settings.
The second part of the "who" question involves a personal choice to participate in social media. Within the Executive Committee alone there is substantial diversity of social media use, from "what is that anyway" to members who microblog during Committee meetings. Some Committee members believe social media is a time sink while others are thrilled to have a means of keeping up with family, friends and general and professional news. All of us have concerns about threats to privacy. Increasingly, Committee members find themselves dragged into social media by family and friends who find the social connection beneficial. We expect our experiences are broadly representative of SER members.
Chances are many SER members use "blogs" and "wikis" without realizing this makes them a social media user. Blogs (from web logs) in the form of text, photos, audio (podcast), and video (vodcast) permeate the internet and provide an outlet for an individual or group to promulgate their own information and comment on information provided by others. Blogs are a bit like a newspaper editorial that generates letters to the editor, except all communications happen in real time and are not subject to screening by an editorial page manager. Wikis are websites that permit multiple users to present information that they and others can then edit, with the notion that information accuracy will be increased through collaboration rather than through formal fact-checking. Carrying the editorial analogy forward, a wiki would be like a group of editors simultaneously writing an editorial in a master document. A quick scan of the internet uncovered a number of epidemiology-related blogs (epiwonk.com for example). While epidemiology appears to be a topic in some wikis, and there are wikis devoted to specific epidemiologic methods, we could not identify a wiki focusing on the broad field of epidemiology.
Traditional blogs (and wiki entries) tend to be at least several paragraphs long, likely a walk in the park for many epidemiologists and an eternity for a 15 year old. Thus short posts, called microblogging, are growing in popularity. Twitter is an example of a microblog in which "authors" post comments no longer than 140 characters. These "tweets" are then automatically sent to other users who have elected to"follow" that particular author. Users can send replies to a tweet, which the original author can send out to their followers (a retweet). Twitter has gained notoriety as a mode of communication from celebrities to fans, but also has served as a social organizing tool in the Middle East uprisings. Twitter use among SER Executive Committee members is limited, perhaps in keeping with the American adults, fewer than 20% of whom use Twitter. Interestingly, of these approximately 25 million users, women and racial/ethnic minorities are represented in greater proportions than in other social media. A number of individuals, schools and journals within the broad field of epidemiology now disseminate information via Twitter.
The current penultimate forms of social media are highly interactive and specifically designed to facilitate networking. These types of outlets make it easy for individuals and groups to establish an account ("profile") with which they can easily send and receive text, photos, and videos to individuals with whom they have agreed to communicate; text length limits usually fall between traditional blogs and tweets. These outlets also encourage ongoing exchanges by allowing users to comment freely on primary information and related comments generated by other users. The phrase "going viral" refers to a piece of information that achieves rapid and widespread dissemination through this type of social media-based networking.
Facebook and LinkedIn are common social media focused on networking; the latter focuses on professionals. The popularity of these sites is widespread and growing. Approximately half of US adults with internet access use Facebook each year; about half of them use it in a given day. The fastest growing segment of users is age 45 years and above, with more women from that age group participating than men. LinkedIn has around 20 million unique visits from US residents monthly. The presence of epidemiologyfocused groups on Facebook seems small; the 3rd North American Congress of Epidemiology uses their page to disseminate more timely meeting updates than can realistically be accomplished via a web page. Informal discussions suggest a strong and growing presence of individual epidemiologists on LinkedIn.
We are interested to hear about your use of social media and to get your suggestions about whether and how SER should become more active in this arena. Do you read blogs, follow someone on Twitter, or have a profile on Facebook or LinkedIn? Which social media outlets do you use, and do you use them for professional purposes? Would you be interested in receiving information from SER via social media? What types of information and through which outlets? Does networking with other SER members via social media hold appeal for you? If SER became involved in social media, what kind of information would you like to see disseminated? Would you be willing to generate information as a primary author, or to comment publicly on material written by others? Should SER attempt to limit our social media use to members or allow open access? In the next newsletter we will update you on what we learn and potential directions for SER. Please email your feedback to Sue Bevan (sbevan@epiresearch.org) with SOCIAL MEDIA as the subject.
SER Travel Scholarships - Congress
SER offered eighteen travel scholarships to our Student and Postdoc members to attend Congress in Montreal, Canada. Applicants were required to have submitted an abstract for the Congress Meeting, submit a short essay on their financial needs, interest in attending Congress, and describe their research interest. Sixty-one applications were submitted. Congratulations to the following individuals who were awarded these scholarships:
- Ban Al-Sahaba - York University, Canada
- Susanne Hansen - University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Theresa Hastert - University of Washington, FHCRC
- Peter James - Harvard School of Public Health
- Kiarri Kershaw - Northwestern University
- Katrina Kezios - Columbia University
- Erin Kreiter - University of Alberta, Canada
- Lareina La Flair - Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
- Cindy Leung - Harvard school of Public Health, Dept. of Nutrition
- Jennifer Lund - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Genevieve Monsees - University of Washington, FHCRC
- Elizabeth Ogburn - Harvard University, Depart. Of Biostatistics
- Anne Ording - Aarhus University, Denmark
- Eyal Oren - University of Washington, Dept. of Epidemiology
- Joshua Rosenbloom - Harvard Medical School, Dept. of Epidem.
- Sara Schonfeld - National Care Institute
- Mikiko Senga - University of Michigan at Ann Arbor
- Deirdre Tobias - Harvard School of Public Health
SER takes a strong interest in their student/postdoc program and hopes to continue to see the participation grow. Join our Student
and Postdoc Committee to be eligible to participate in the various
offers and programs SER continues to provide!
Thank You for Donating!
A special thank you to the following individuals for their generous contributions to SER. These contributed funds help us offset operating expenses for our student memberships. In this way, SER can continue to provide our student membership with lower membership and meeting registration fees. These donations will also assist with student travel scholarships to our annual meeting which for 2011 we awarded 18 scholarships!
| Tomi Akinyemiju Sandra Arevalo Maegan Ashworth Debora Barnes-Josiah Pranom Chaigkong Wei-Chu Chie Tom D Y Chin Suzanne Cloutier Jan Willem Coebergh Mary E Cogswell Stephen P Fortmann |
Ann M Geiger Susan G Gerberich Michael E Ginevan Mary N Haan Robin B Harris Yasushi Honda Chanelle Howe Keiji Imai Judith Jacobson George A Kaplan John Kurtzke |
Margaret Kurzius-Spencer Joseph Lowry Stephen S Morse Tammie Nelson Andrew F Olshan Nancy J Payte Ali Rowhani-Rahbar Avima Ruder Victor Schoenbach Catherine West Steve Woolley |