Attending conferences and invited talks

Hello folks, here I am with my monthly update about my work and basically what I am up to. A few (mostly happy) things have happened since last time so thought it would be nice to share them with you.

• First, the work of a UCL PhD student I am currently supervising has been published in Value in Health, congratulations Xiaoxiao you did an excellent job! The paper is an updated review of current approches used in the heath economics literature for dealing with missing data (you don’t say), this time taking a more diaggregated perspective compared to prevoius reviews and looking at which “level” missingness was reported/addressed in these studies, namely quesionnarie item, questionnaire score or aggregate levels. It took a lot of work to get this work done since it requires a huge amount of time to review the literature as well as to find an intuitive way to communicate the results from this extraction work, which it turned out to be quite complex (weirdly enough).

• Second, my abstract submission for lolaHESG 2022 has been accepted and I will be present my new work at the conference this upcoming May here in Maastricht. This is the first time I will be attending this health economics conference which is very specific to the Netherlands but which shares the same structure and format of the standard HESG confernce in the UK (which I already attended a couple of times). I think there will be room for some nice discussions about both theoretical and applied works and I am eager to meet up new colleagues and to share our research ideas and, why not, get to know each other and possibly find new collaborations!

• Third, my other abstract submission for EUHEA 2022 has also been accepted as an oral presentation which I will disucss this June in Oslo. I am very excited for this conference given that I have never been to Oslo before (which looks amazing, I mean look at the picture!) and which was initially planned in the summer of 2020 but that, for obvious reasons, was then cancelled. I will talk about my work in a more international context still related to health economics and I hope I will be able to meet up with some old colleagues and to have an update of what they have been doing these last couple of years. I stil need to sort out a few things about the dates due to some issues in booking my registration but I hope I will be able to fix these problems as soon as possible!

• Fourth, I have been kindly invited to give some talks about my reserahc work at a few different online health economics seminar series in the next months, which I would be glad to do. These include: a seminar held by the Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment group at VU Amsterdam with whom I had a very nice chat and fruitful research discussion back in February; the Statistics, Health Economics and Methodology Seminar at PRIMENT Clinical Trials Unit which I attended for a few years while I was doing my post-doc research in the UK and for whom I would be happy to share my current work; the King’s Health Economics seminar held by the Health Service and Population Research Department which has showed some interest in my work about missing data methods which makes me already happy to give my availability. Lots of interesting stuff. I just need to find the time to prepare all these talks…..

Among other things I have been doing and which are worth mentioning there is this on-going teaching qualification course I am attending which is very funny but also quite useful in order to take the official role of course coordinator for future courses, some talks with private consultancy companies for which I am about to start collaborating to earn some money on behalf of my department, and getting my booster vaccination dose which had a quite strong impact on my last two days (basically a walking zombie for most of the days). Perhaps, the last thing to mention is that I will need to start working on my reserach grant VENI pre-proposal, whose deadline is September 2022. Although this is just a pre-proposal phase (done to screen out the many applications), I really need to focus and put some effort in laying down my application to the best of my abilities to at least pass this phase. Last year I did not make it but this was also due to the fact that I only had about 2 months time to write down my proposal with basically no time for feeback from any colleagues which, instead, I fully intend to ask in order to improve the chances of success. Fingers crossed for this year!

At least I am excited to enjoy myself at one of these upcoming conferences and meet up with some new/old colleagues in my reserach field given that it has been a while since last time I was able to travel for reserach!