Post-conference workshops/courses

[Admin]

Post-conference workshops will be held Sunday September 4th from 9.00 to 12.30. So this time the workshops can run half day only. People will be invited to submit workshop/courses proposals, but if there is anything that would be particularly valuable we may want to make the effort to encourage these ourselves. Possible ideas are 1. Satellite data for PM exposure estimation is an area of strong interest, and international attendees might appreciate learning how to obtain and use such data 2. For those proficient in R, a series of advanced sessions on R packages (perhaps spatio-temporal) could also be offered.

Do we want a chair for the workshops/courses, any volunteers? Please, post comments.

[Ana Maria Mora]

I am a bit worried about the low attendance that these post-conference workshops, courses, or ancillary meeting might have. How did past conference organizers select the topics of these workshops? Do people always submit proposals and then some are selected?
Personally, I would be interested in attending a workshop on how to better communicate and engage with the public about rapidly evolving research associated with environmental health sciences and epidemiology. Environmental Health Sciences, a not-for-profit organization, used to have a Science Communication Fellowship program, but it ran out of funding in 2012. It could be interesting to invite whomever coordinated this fellowship or another expert in the topic to submit a workshop/course proposal.
I also think that it is important to at least try to avoid a lot of overlap between topics for post-conference workshops, because people usually struggle trying to decide which one to attend.