All BEMC Talks will be held online as Zoom webinars until further notice. Be sure to register early to secure your spot! Selected BEMC Talks will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.
BEMC Talks are generally held on the first Wednesday of each month at 4pm Berlin time (GMT+01:00) with some adjustments for holidays. They consist of an hour-long lecture followed by an interactive group discussion with the speaker.
2021 BEMC Talks
| Date | Speaker | Talk title & description |
| January 13th, 2021 | Matthew Sperrin, Manchester | When is causal thinking needed for prediction? “When prediction models are implemented, they are often interpreted causally. For example, a model that predicts mortality in hospitalized covid-19 patients might be used to triage patients – with patients at low risk being considered for discharge. However, a patient may be predicted as low risk because of the care that similar patients received in hospital in the past – which would not be equivalent to the care that they would receive post-discharge. In this talk, I will describe some of the problems with misinterpretation of prediction models – and introduce some of the emerging methods to develop ‘counterfactual’ prediction models.“ |
| February 3rd, 2021 | Stefan Konigorski, Potsdam | Digital N-of-1 trials: connecting personalised medicine and population-level studies? “Traditionally, guidelines and recommendations on health interventions have been obtained from studies of large groups of individuals. However, the derived average intervention effects do not allow meaningful insights on whether an intervention will help a given individual. N-of-1 trials are multi-crossover randomised controlled trials in a single participant which allow investigating individual-level intervention effects. Series of N-of-1 trials can then be aggregated to obtain population-level effect estimates. In this talk, I will present our open-source platform StudyU (arxiv.org/abs/2012.14201) which allows to digitally design, publish, and conduct N-of-1 trials. I will describe appropriate statistical methods for the analysis and discuss how this platform might be helpful to bridge individual-level and population-level studies.” |
| March 3rd, 2021 Webinar registration | Anthony Matthews, Stockholm | Comparing Effect Estimates in Randomised Trials and Observational Studies “The ability for observational data to deliver similar results as a trial that asks the same question about the risks or benefits of a clinical intervention can be restricted not only by lack of randomization, but also by study design and limitations of available data. This talk will give a brief introduction to the target trial framework, which is the application of design principles from randomized trials to the analysis of observational data. We will then use Swedish register data to apply this framework to a question on the effects of anticoagulant therapies under percutaneous coronary intervention, which will help us understand how and why differences may occur between results from randomized trials and observational analyses.“ |
| April 7th, 2021 | Sonia Boender, Berlin | Social Media for Public Health #SoMe4epis “Social media have become an integral part of our society, and therefore belong in the domain of public health. Sharing of content, the way we seek and judge information, and interaction on a personal and professional level is taking place both on- and offline. The flexibility and speed of social media provide new opportunities for professional networking, outreach to communities, and the way we conduct and disseminate research. This talk aims to share the unique advantages and functionalities of social and platforms that are not always well known to epidemiologists. Ultimately, this talk aims to address common fears, and encourages epidemiologists to use social media for networking with colleagues, as well as engagement in science communication with the general public.“ |
| May 5th, 2021 | Eleanor Murray, Boston | TBA |
| June 2nd, 2021 | Sabine Gabrysch, Berlin | A Cluster-Randomised Controlled Field Trial in Practice: The Food and Agricultural Approaches to Reducing Malnutrition (FAARM) study in Bangladesh |
| July 7th, 2021 | Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, Nijmegen | Current methodological challenges in the study of sex and gender in health research |
| August 2021 | No BEMC Talk | Summer break |
| September 1st, 2021 | Ben Van Calster, Leuven | TBA |
| October 6th, 2021 | Tracey Weissgerber, Berlin | TBA |
| November 3rd, 2021 | Sebastián Martínez, Glasgow | Causal Inference in the Presence of Interference: Generalised Propensity Score Application on Public Health “Traditional causal inference methodologies are based on the assumption that treatment does not spill over between units. There are several applications in which this assumption does not hold and the causal inference community has risen to the challenge, significantly expanding the literature that looks at this problem during the last 10-15 years. In this talk we are going to look at some of the different ideas and focus on disentangling main effects from spillover effects in observational settings using a generalised propensity score methodology developed by Airoldi et al. (2020). We use simulations to explore some of the boundaries of this particular method and apply it to a public health peer-driven intervention.“ |
| December 1st, 2021 |
