Back from holidays

Hi folks, it is good to be back on the blog after some nice vacation spent with my family and friends. This is one of the best parts of the year as people have not all come back to work and I have a bit of time to do my own things without being bothered with crazy requests. However, it is also a very anxious part of the year as you can defintely count the number of days this will last, which are not many. Once the machine starts, it will be usual work once more and I really need to avoid thinking about that if I want to survive.

As for my news, not too much going on due to my vacation since I came back from my EuHEA 2022 conference in Oslo (nice times those!). I have been invited to give a talk on September 5 at a health economics seminar at King’s College London by the lovely Lily, which I am eager to give in order to receive some feedback and understand what kind of audience attends these types of seminars. I will present my new and ongoing work about missing data analysis in the context of health economic evaluations, which I already presented this year at another seminar at Health economics and health technology assessment department at VU and which had a very nice immpact on the audience. The more feedback I am able to gather to develop this idea, the better it will be for finalising the project.

What else? well, I still need to catch up with some old collegaues for existing collaborations and projects that I need to dive into once again. I have a few meetings already planned in the upcoming days and I hope to catch with these things as soon as possible (also because I will risk to forget some of these if I don’t!). I am also finalising my VENI pre-proposal call that I would like to submit before the start of September. Last time it did not go very well for my application but this year I have gathered much more feedback and inputs from different collegaues on my research idea and I hope i will be able to make it through the pre-proposal phase, but let’s see because these grants applications can be very annoying sometimes! I am really convinced that my idea has some strong potential for the future of statistical research in the context of health economics and I hope the referees and the committe members will be able to see it too. Howevver, the final outcome may also depend on the amount of projects submitted which is typically a lot, so competition is really harsh for these grants. Fingers crossed!

Lastly, I also need to catch up with my teaching material which I started developing before leaving for holidays. I am at a good point but at the beginning of September I will need to coordinate a new bachelor course on a subject that I need to re-study a bit since it has been a while since last time I reviewed it. In the upcoming days I will make sure to catch up with these things. The annoying part is that the new semester will start soon and with that a lot of routine things which take a lot of time from my research, such as answeering emails, set up meetings, etc…. Ehhhhh (sigh).