Emma presenting during the rapid-fire presentation competition.
Rapid Fire
Our Emma Buajitti won first place in the Rapid Fire Presentation Award at this year’s Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CSEB) conference. The 2018 national conference, held at Lakehead University’s main campus in Thunder Bay, Ontario, from June 15-17, featured a relatively new “rapid fire” presentation segment.
Under rapid fire rules, presenters work within visual limitations like: a maximum of 1 PowerPoint slide, without animation or sound, that may not be an exact replicate of that presenter’s physical poster (despite their poster and slide describing the same project data). There is a temporal restriction too: 3 minutes are on the clock, and every second over that mark results in a point deduction.
Small-Area Mortality Analyses in Ontario
The aim with this kind of intensive presentation is brevity, yes, but also conviction and validity. Under such strict temporal and visual prohibitions, presenters must rely on the nimble articulation of their project alone—something that comes from a deep understanding of their topic, their data, and their findings.
Emma’s speedy summary of whether Bayesian hierarchical models (a statistical model that estimates, after taking into account relevant evidence, the parameters of an event’s conditional probability) can improve small-area mortality analyses in Ontario hit all the right marks. Within her three allotted minutes, Emma explained why the Bayesian hierarchical model matters in this context, what makes it difficult to implement, and finally how such an approach assists mortality analyses in Ontario.
Congratulations Emma!