Lessons Learned from Organizing and Hosting Regional Events

The 2025 AMMnet seminar series kicked off on Tuesday, January 7th with four presentations from AMMnet Small Event awardees. We first heard from Sampob Saralamba about a two-day short course put on at Mahodol University, Thailand to teach the RShiny package. The feedback from the course was very positive and participants succeeded in creating basic RShiny apps. Keller Konkon then presented on a Benin event introducing researchers involved in vector control to modeling for operational decision-making. He emphasized the importance of the organization and recruiting process, including involving experts in the field and from the PNLP. Olawale Awe described how a Small Event award was used in a three-day workshop at IMECC, Brazil, which focused on integrating AI and ML for malaria and infectious disease modeling. This workshop also served as the inaugural meeting for the AMMnet local chapter in Brazil. Finally, Ezra Gayawan shared experiences from a two-day training he facilitated at Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria. Participants were introduced to geospatial modeling and how the methods can be applied to public health topics.

The presenters reported positive feedback from participants in post-event surveys, and some presenters described continuing to provide technical assistance to participants after the course. Common challenges arose when the Small Event award was used for training, including difficulty accommodating the needs of all participants with a wide range of background skills, limits in the amount of material that could be addressed within a single event, and inability to host longer workshops or to fly in remote participants with the available budget. At the close of the seminar, Jaline Gerardin provided some suggestions for groups interested in applying for Small Events awards in the future, including types of events that could be funded and tips for improving the application’s chance of being approved and funded.