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A panel of
educators from Massachusetts graduate schools including Boston
University, Harvard, Tufts, and the University of Massachusetts
spearheaded a plenary session at SER devoted to a discussion of
key emerging issues in the training of epidemiologists for the 21st
century. The session was organized by Harvard’s Julie Buring
and Bernard Harlow from the University of Minnesota who
chaired the session. According to Harvard’s Michele Williams,
a panel member, the session was extremely well attended and each
of the panelists took a different approach in highlighting key
issues.
Boston
University’s Martha Werler used a series of four vignettes
to illustrate some of the pathways that young epidemiologists are
navigating to get from their training to a satisfying job
situation. Werler was candid in telling attendees that the
motivation of graduate students might well involve a desire to
become independent, productive, and creative research scientists
in epidemiology and a desire to improve public health, but a prime
motivation is also to get a job!
Werler told the
stories of four epidemiologists who had graduated in the past 3-6
years and how they got to their current positions. (See 4
vignettes in the following story). Common themes which emerged
were that the students worked while in school on projects separate
from their dissertation and they used their first job as a kind of
post-doc experience to springboard to a satisfying career
position.
Dissertation
Workshop
For her
presentation, Williams highlighted observations she made while
mentoring a dozen doctoral students the day before as part of a
Student Dissertation Workshop at the SER. She told the
Epidemiology Monitor that she was struck by the breadth of the
regions represented at the workshop and by the creative research
questions being asked by the students.
The issue of the
types of research questions being asked by students came up in the
discussion period, said Williams. In an address earlier in the
day, Columbia’s Sandro Galea, had expressed concerns about
the apparent disconnect between much of the epidemiologic research
being published and the impact on population health. Williams
described some of the research questions being asked by the
doctoral students in the workshop to note that students are asking
relevant and “really cool” questions. Some of them are not
etiologic but could be considered health economics, said Williams.
She believes students in epidemiology today recognize the
importance of asking relevant questions and may even be pushing
the more mature members of the field in that direction.
Other panel members at the session were Paul
Jacques from Tufts University and Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson
from the University of Massachusetts.
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