I’ve just returned from the 2018 Survival Analysis for Junior Researchers conference in Leiden, fresh with inspiration and wishing I was a PhD student again to have the luxury of time and independence to research all the ideas in my head. As with previous years it was extremely well organised with a variety of interesting talks, I particularly enjoyed the sessions on Causal Inference and Dynamic Prediction and hope to incorporate some of what I’ve learnt into my work. Since it’s aimed at early career researchers there’s a very friendly atmosphere with people keen to learn new techniques and exchange ideas; I find it especially useful in helping to bring me up to speed with current trends in biostatistics research as I’m relatively new to the field.
The keynotes were very interesting and highly relevant to my work, including Maja Pohar Perme, Liesbeth de Wreede, and Hein Putter, developer of the R mstate package who gave a tutorial on multi-state modelling. The latter was particularly helpful for me, since I was presenting work on applying multi-state modelling to our HMRN data to model patient treatment pathways in Follicular Lymphoma (slides available for download here).
It was also my first time chairing a session, which was a very enjoyable experience despite my initial anxieties. Next year, however, I’d like to find a conference more appropriate for my work, which is typically more applied, whereas SAfJR tends to attract methodological talks from biostatisticians.