Going back to teaching, hurray!

Hello everbody and it is good to be back after a nice and cozy Easter break. As probably most of you, I was too forced to spend my Easter holidays away from my family this year but at least here in the Netherlands the weather was pretty nice during the Easter weekend and I was able to enjoy a nice walk through the city center of Maastricht which was an amazing experience. Even though the week after it started snowing for some absurd reason, I really needed this short break from my teaching duties at the university to recharge my batteries.

I also took this chance to going back to some old projects that needed my attention and was able to move them forwards a bit with some extra work but that is fine since I love my research. Now, I am ready again for some new teaching and consultancy in the upcoming two months and, hopefully, these will be the last official committments for this academic year. In addition, going towards summer time brings some new fresh air and hope for a period of the year with fewer restrictions and the chance to engage with some other human beings. It is not that I am a huge fan of interacting with people but it is defintely necessary to the human nature to avoid becoming crazy. I also hope I will soon be able to travel back to Italy and see my familiy and friends which I have not had the chance to see in person from more than one year ago. Anyway, sorry about all the wining and let’s get back to the actual important news.

First, I am happy to announce that my paper on Bayesian methods for modelling data in survival-partitioned cost-utility analyses has been accepted for publication by the journal Medical Decision Making and in the upcoming months it should be officially published as an open access paper so that everyone who has an interest on the matter can have access to the paper. In the meantime, you can also see a past version of the paper on my ArXiv which in any case is pretty close to the final version, I think. I am exremely happy to publish to solo work on which I spent lots of time and effort and which represents a nice application of Bayesian methods as a comprehensive modelling framework for handling different types of statistical issues that usually affect health economic data. Nice!

Second, I am considering submitting an abstract to the R-HTA 2021 workshop which this year will take place in Dublin, at the Trinity College Dublin - see picture below, between July 1-2. This is a very interesting opportunity to spread my work as this annual conference invites people who have different levels of skills with R to present their projects, especially in the form of R packages, to support the statistical and health economic analyses within the international HTA environment, from applicative to methodological works. It could be a very nice spot where to promote my own package for handling missing HTA data, missingHE, as well as to receive some nice feedback for experts on how to further improve its structure/functions. I would also love to visit Dublin as I never had the chance. Unfortunately this may not be possible as it depends on the current and future restrictions that are imposed and tht may hinder my ability to travel even in the summer. Having this as an online thing is also another option, although not really exicting.

Anyway, now stop talking and let’s go back to work as I need to do some teaching before anything else!