A new year and many new activities and developments to share with you.

The Society is continuing to provide interesting offerings. On January 20, SARGC held a workshop over zoom on “Visualizing Data: From Tables to Interactive Dashboards”, and on February 21, the Biostatistics Section held our first and highly successful Instats event, a free workshop on “Advanced Data Visualization in R” with over 800 registrants. On February 24, I gave a workshop on Instats entitled “Statistical Methods for Adaptive Treatment Strategies”; this workshop was not free, but rather was run as a means of bringing revenue to the Society. I hope this will prove a profitable avenue for income generation for our society in the future.

As you may have seen, a new initiative is being launched to bring our community closer: SSC Community Connections will highlight individual members of our society, featuring the experiences and professional journey of members. These will be published in Liaison. Please keep your eyes open for this new feature, and if you are interested in being featured, fill out this form: https://forms.gle/7LoqkHpAKmh4oJyx5. Thanks to Tolu Sajobi, Luke Hagar, and Félix Camirand Lemyre for getting this underway!

Also, a brief reminder that WISC’s pilot mentoring program is now live.

In prizes news, the SSC is partnering with CANSSI, who has added a monetary prize valued at $3000 to the Impact Award. In recognition of this, the prize has been renamed the SSC-CANSSI Award for Impact, following the December SSC board meeting.

Registration is now open for the 2025 annual meeting, which will be held May 25-28 at the University of Saskatchewan. Registration is also open for the CSSC, to be held May 24. I look forward to seeing you there!

In other meeting news, the 2026 meeting will be held at McMaster University.

Finally, I am disappointed to report that our NSERC PromoScience grant application to support Florence Nightingale Days and the Statistics and Data Science to Schools programs was unsuccessful. Some activities are already underway – I myself will be going into a high school to discuss statistics and causal inference for sports in a local high school in celebration of Pi Day. Please reach out if you are interested in getting a Florence Nightingale Day underway or organizing an event in a local school – even as we continue to seek funding, we can provide some logistical support and provide useful connections to help facilitate the organization. I am very excited to see the SSC take part in events that can complement those of CANSSI, which has successfully run several Florence Nightingale events in the past few years.

I hope the year is off to a good start, and the lengthening days bring renewed energy.

Erica Moodie

McGill University