Methods Incubator for Junior Researchers

– June 1, 2015Posted in: News and Announcements, Statistical Opportunities

Sherri Rose and Laura Hatfield, Harvard

What are the best things about statistics conferences?

  • Connecting with colleagues
  • Meeting new people and learning about their research
  • Finding inspiration in new ideas
  • Sharing your work with an engaged audience

But how often do these happen?

You have to ‘disrupt’ a conference first by adding interactive opportunities with tangible benefits for junior researchers. Imagine conference activities that emphasize communicating with broader audiences, spreading innovation across subfields, and fostering engagement with works in progress. The “Methods Incubator” workshop, debuting at the International Conference on Health Policy Statistics (ICHPS) on October 7, was created to do this.

The incubator creators recruited six “team leaders” to propose interesting methods problems in varied areas. Early-career researchers (e.g., postdocs, junior faculty, and equivalent in government and industry) indicate their interest by submitting a paragraph about how they might solve a particular team’s problem and sending in their CVs. Team leaders will invite 6-8 applicants to join each team. Before the conference, invited team members will submit a 1-2 page description of their approach to the problem, which could include preliminary data analysis of provided data. The idea is that each team member will arrive at the conference having thought critically about the problem. At the workshop, everyone will briefly share their ideas within teams, and then teams will collaboratively work on the most promising ideas for 2-3 hours (likely each team will break into smaller project groups based on mutual interest in particular approaches). The aim is for project groups to make progress toward a manuscript at the conference and continue to collaborate afterward.

The Methods Incubator for Junior Researchers at ICHPS features topics on behavior intervention trials, physician payment, difference-in-difference estimators, multiple outcomes, missing data, and spatial confounding. See Sherri Rose’s website for details and registration information. The first deadline for participation is June 30.

To learn more, download a detailed workshop PDF.