In June 2019, I travelled to Minneapolis, Minnesota USA for the Society for Epidemiologic Research Annual Meeting funded by the Baume Travel Grant. The conference was well attended by more than 1500 public health professionals from a range of research areas, including methodologists, biostatisticians, as well as those working on topics such as mental health, substance use, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

I presented a poster on my PhD research titled ‘Identifying long-term psychological distress from single measures: Nationally representative evidence from Australia’. The poster session was very interactive and a wonderful opportunity for me to connect with others working on similar research topics. I had great conversations with a number of like-minded researchers and developed a number of contacts.

During the conference, I attended three workshops – honing your soft skills on the job market, the use of e-values for quantitative bias analysis and a session on directed acyclic graphs – as well as sessions on methods development, mental health and cardiovascular disease. I was inspired by the quality of the research presented, which seemed on the forefront of the field and represented one of the most beneficial professional development activities I’ve been involved in. 

As well as being interesting, a number of sessions were also incredibly fun! The conference included a debate on which source of bias was ‘the baddest of the bad’, an interactive lunchtime quiz ‘who wants to be an epidemiologist’, and a really informative session on what makes a good peer reviewer. During session breaks, I was able to talk with leaders in the field, including people whose textbooks have informed my PhD research.

Attending this conference has been the highlight of my PhD Candidature so far. I left feeling inspired to continue and improve my research. I am grateful to those who made this travel possible, including those involved in the Baume Travel Award.

** Jenny Welsh is in her final year of her PhD at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health within the Research School of Population Health. Her PhD research examines the role of depression and anxiety as risk factors for the onset of cardiovascular disease.