Dr Brittany Johnson, Senior Research Fellow at Flinders University and EPOCH-Translate Stream 1 Leader, reflects on her experience attending the Pediatric Academic Societies 2025 Meeting

Thanks to support from an EPOCH-Translate travel grant, I was fortunate to attend the Pediatric Academic Societies 2025 Meeting (PAS 2025) held in Honolulu, Hawaii, from 24-28 April. The PAS Meeting brings together clinicians, educators and researchers from across the United States and around the world, all with an interest in child and adolescent health. This year’s meeting was the most highly attended meeting, with over 8,800 attendees from 57 countries, perhaps due to the tropical conference location!

During the conference, I attended a range of engaging sessions, such as a keynote speech by Aaron Carroll on science communication in relation to change management, as well as workshops on leadership, using AI in paediatric research and education, multilingual research methods, climate change impacts in the first 1,000 days of life, and economic evaluations from different stakeholder perspectives.

The leadership workshop ‘Building a Dream Team’ was highly interactive, including attendees role-playing strategies and participating in team activities designed to create a safe space to foster psychological safety and encourage collaboration. I attended presentations on obesity, paediatric nutrition and public health and prevention by speakers at various career stages and from diverse professional backgrounds.

I presented a poster on the TOPCHILD Collaboration intervention coding project titled: “Behavioural components and delivery features of early childhood obesity prevention interventions: a systematic review and intervention coding of studies in the TOPCHILD Collaboration”. The poster session was a valuable opportunity to network with others presenting like-minded research, such as postdoctoral researchers and fellows involved in the TOPCHILD trials. Several TOPCHILD Collaboration members attended the conference. It was wonderful to meet collaborators in person after many years of working together virtually, including Advisory Group members Lee Sanders and Shonna Yin.

(From left): Professor Anna-Lene Seidler, Dr Kylie Hunter, Dr Brittany Johnson – Stream 1 Leads of CRE EPOCH-Translate