This issue wasn't planned around a particular theme, but one emerged anyway.

Several of the articles reflect on the paths that brought people to SMDM - and what convinced them to stay. Reading them together was a nice reminder that successful professional societies aren't built solely on excellent research. They're built through mentorship, volunteer work, chance conversations, and the communities that grow around them.

You'll find those themes throughout this issue, including Katie Martinez's reflections on more than a decade of SMDM membership, the Career Development Committee co-chairs' perspectives on mentorship and service, and Emily Burger and Torbjørn Wisløff's look back at a memorable Annual Meeting in Oslo, where SMDM welcomed a recent-meeting record of 576 attendees to our first annual meeting outside North America. Alongside those reflections are articles on risk communication, a new funding opportunity, member achievements, and other ways to stay engaged with the society.

This is my last issue as editor, and I'd like to thank everyone who has contributed articles, announcements, ideas, photos, and countless last-minute responses over the past two years. It's been a privilege to help tell the society's story, and I'm grateful to everyone who made that possible.

From the SMDM leaders and staff: We'd like to extended a special thank you to Helen Colby as she finishes her service as this newsletter's Editor-in-Chief. We are grateful for her vision, dedication, and time in making the newsletter a publication that SMDM can be proud of. Thank you Helen!

Reflections and Thanks

Thank you to our amazing SMDM 2026 48th Annual Meeting co-chairs Emily Burger and Torbjørn Wisløff, our dedicated project management team, tireless volunteers, and all who delivered rigorous and impactful scientific contributions; you’re the momentum behind our expanding international footprint. From early waypoints in Toronto (1983) and Leiden (1986, our first biennial European meeting) to this July’s vibrant gathering in Oslo, we’ve transformed a set of meetings into a truly connected international community. We’ve now tuned our rhythm to a single global cadence - two meetings in North America followed by one in Europe - with recent stops in Boston, Ann Arbor, and now Oslo. And here’s a telling snapshot of that momentum: we planned for fewer than 300 attendees in Oslo and welcomed over 550, nearly double, reflecting strong engagement from both Europe and North America. As the rotation continues to bridge continents, we’re energized to close remaining gaps in Asia, Eastern Europe and other regions. 

As our meetings grow globally and our attendance increases, the question naturally follows: what remains at SMDM’s core? Decision science is showing up everywhere at clinical meetings, in health economics, and across HTA; our role is to lead on methods and collaborate for impact. With ISPOR, we launched SMDM-ISPOR Frontiers in Health Decision Modeling initiative in Philadelphia; in Oslo, we tackled “Where causal inference meets modeling,” and at ISPOR in Vienna we’ll spotlight GenAI agents for model conceptualization and transportability. We’re updating the ISPOR–SMDM Good Modeling Practice papers to set the next standard. Ambassadors with the International Shared Decision Making Society are aligning our SDM SIG and leadership, and our partnership with SUSTAIN HTA is translating innovative methods into real-world decisions. We also conducted a very engaged business meeting, collecting ideas and reflecting on our history of fruitful collaborations with further peer societies.

We reviewed recent abstracts - AI-assisted, human-checked - because methods power everything we do. In Oslo, we saw our SMDM core come to life. Decision science, health economics, and decision psychology are thriving; we’re eager to welcome deeper contributions from biostatistics, operations research, data science, implementation science, and neighboring disciplines. Cancer and cardiovascular work are prominent, and we aim to deepen ties with infectious disease modelers - as well as colleagues working in primary care, mental health, rare diseases, and global health. If this is your area, or you can introduce a colleague, SMDM welcomes you.

After one meeting comes the next. Mark your calendars: 6–9 June 2027, we’ll gather in Toronto for SMDM’s 49th Annual Meeting, returning to a city that hosted one of our earliest global milestones. And 11–14 June 2028, we’ll celebrate our golden 50th Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City; let’s sustain the international momentum in methods, collaboration, and impact.

Thank you to all our donors and funders - individual members and private philanthropists, industry partners, institutional and academic sponsors, the SMDM Development Committee, and fundraising volunteers. Your support powers our society and our meeting; funds travel awards and trainee scholarships; catalyzes methods initiatives; and sustains key programs throughout the year.

We are very proud that the new Decision Psychology Pilot Award, made possible by a generous gift from Brian Zikmund-Fisher, has been established. For interested researchers, don’t miss the Decision Psychology Special Interest Group’s new Pilot Research Idea Tournament.

New developments with the Patient Advisory Council (led by Chairs Ellen Engelhardt and Ashley Housten); we’re rethinking the PAC as a source of information and guidance for working together with patients. Check out the glossary the PAC has produced, available on our website.

I’m proud that we now have so many ways to stay connected. Please take advantage of them. Even if you’re on annual break or headed on vacation, sneak in a webinar between adventures or queue up a short course on the train. Stay engaged year-round through webinars, short courses, the Core Course certificate, and our SIGs, and help shape SMDM by joining committees, volunteering for SIG leadership, and entering the Board pipeline. See you soon.

Beate Jahn

President, Society for Medical Decision Making

Why We Stay

Katie Martinez, PhD

Why do some people remain members of a professional society for decades?

It’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. As Membership Co-Chair, I’ve spent time considering what attracts people to SMDM and, even more importantly, what keeps them coming back year after year. This year marks my 13th year as an SMDM member and my 12th annual meeting. (I only missed Vancouver because I was too pregnant!) When I reflect on this journey, I realize the reasons I joined are not the reasons I stayed.



Like many members, I joined SMDM as a trainee. I was looking for a place to present my research, meet others with similar interests, and learn from leaders in the field. I found all those things. What I didn’t expect was to find a professional home.

My first meeting was in Baltimore in 2013. As a first-year postdoc, I was astonished by the expertise of my fellow attendees. It was hard at that point to imagine I would ever belong to the same professional society as these giants of decision science! Over time, I stopped feeling like the newest person in the room. Familiar faces became collaborators, mentors became friends, and eventually I found myself judging Lusted posters, serving on committees, and singing karaoke. Those experiences didn’t happen because I attended a single annual meeting. They happened because I kept coming back.

It’s not hyperbole that I owe my entire career to my involvement in SMDM. I interviewed for my current academic position pool-side at the Trump Doral, a meeting facilitated by another SMDM member. SMDM members were mentors on my K award, champions for my recent stint on the board, and now, Co-Is on my first R01. They have also ushered me through phases of impostor syndrome, challenges balancing work and family, and navigating the tricky position of being a PhD in a medicine department. None of those opportunities came from attending a single meeting. They came from belonging to a community I kept returning to.

Every long-time member was once a first-time attendee nervously wandering around a poster session. My hope is that today's new members will someday discover what so many of us have: the reasons we join SMDM are not the reasons we stay. We stay because, over time, this becomes more than an annual meeting. It becomes a home we return to for the science and for one another.

What do you mean by “Rare”?

Alistair Thorpe, PhD

Verbal probability words are everywhere. We use them because they are easy, familiar, and seem to work just fine for everyday life. It is rare to find parking that close to the stadium. That coffee shop is almost always busy. Most of the time, no one stops the conversation to ask, “I am sorry, but did you mean 8%, 30%, or 70% of the time?”

While their flexibility is part of why verbal probability words are useful, it is also why they can be problematic. Multiple studies show that people do not map verbal probabilities onto numbers in the same way. For example, a review published in J Gen Intern Med covering 24 studies found that interpretations of “rare” ranged from 0% to 80%, and for “common” ranged from 10% to 100%.

There are many reasons why people may think of different numbers when they are told something is “unlikely”. For instance, saying it is “unlikely to rain” may give people different ideas depending on whether the sentence ends with “in Seattle” or “in Las Vegas” because people have different ideas of how likely it is to rain in those places to begin with. The relationship between the speaker and listener matters too. A friend saying “You might have upset some people” could reflect genuine uncertainty, or it could be them hedging, softening criticism, and trying to be polite even though they know you did. Another issue is directionality. Saying “There is a small chance this could happen” and “this is unlikely to happen” may appear to convey similar probabilities, but they turn attention in different directions. The first phrasing draws attention to the fact that the event might happen, whereas the second draws focus toward it not happening, which can influence whether people think an event is more or less likely.

Together, these few examples show that what people hear in a probability word can depend on multiple factors including their prior expectations, who is saying it, and the particular way the probability word is phrased. This creates a particular problem for health communication as these words are often used around high stakes decisions such as whether to start a medication, pursue cancer screening, or undergo surgery. This matters because a patient who is told a medication’s side effects are “rare” without further context may believe they will never affect them or might think it likely enough to change whether they intend to take the treatment. 

For that reason, in our JAMA Insights piece, Brian Zikmund-Fisher, Angela Fagerlin, and I started with this recommendation for helping reach informed decisions: When communicating risk probabilities, use numbers, even if approximate, rather than verbal probability terms alone. This does not mean removing words from patient conversations, but rather not relying on words like “rare” or “unlikely” to do the work of numbers, especially when the goal is to help patients make informed decisions about their health. Of course, communicating medical numbers is difficult, and this only touches the surface. In the article, we also discuss the use of consistent denominators, reporting percent change with absolute differences, using part-to-whole visualizations, and providing contextual or interpretive information. Each of these choices matters, and together they illustrate how much of health communication lies not in what we say, but in how we choose to say it.

Finding Our Place at SMDM

Marissa Reitsma, PhD; Stijntje Dijk, MD, PhD; Jinyi Zhu, PhD

Career Development Committee Co-Chairs

As co-chairs of the Career Development Committee (CDC), we spend a lot of time thinking about how to help SMDM members connect, grow, and feel at home in our community. The CDC leads activities that support the professional development of society members at all career stages. When we were invited to write this newsletter piece, we wanted to use the opportunity to reflect on our own journeys and the role SMDM and the CDC have played in them. Here are three stories about what SMDM has meant to each of us.

Marissa Reitsma: I first attended SMDM as a second-year PhD student in 2020. Even though the conference was held virtually, I was impressed by how welcoming and supportive the community felt. I participated in the One-to-One Mentorship Program and was paired with Karen Kuntz. We had a great conversation that year, and my positive experience through this CDC flagship program inspired me to sign up as a volunteer. I ended up co-leading the mentorship program for several years, which allowed me to connect with many SMDM members and give back to the society. I encourage you to consider joining the CDC or another SMDM committee that aligns with your interests. It’s a wonderful way to meet other members while contributing to programs that make our society special.

Stijntje Dijk: I was fortunate that my PhD supervisor, Myriam Hunink, was a major advocate for SMDM. Our university funded one international conference during our studies, and for me, that was SMDM in Berlin. What impressed me most was the genuine willingness of senior researchers to help juniors grow. This was visible in many ways: from the highly attended poster sessions and casual coffee breaks to what was most impressive and new to me, the CDC activities like speed mentoring and one-on-one sessions. The great thing about SMDM is that if you benefit from an initiative, you are always welcome to contribute to it the following year. Regardless of your background or experience level, anyone with time and ideas will find a welcoming community within the society that shares their passion. It’s also a fun way to get to know people from other institutions, hear about their work and how their PhD trajectories differ from your own, and make sure the next conference you visit you’ll have plenty of reunions to look forward to.

Jinyi Zhu: I first attended SMDM in 2017 as a second-year PhD student. I wasn’t presenting that year; I came to listen, learn, and get a sense of the field. What I remember most, though, was how welcoming the community felt. By the next meeting, I was recognizing familiar faces in poster sessions and hallways and felt like I truly belonged. The CDC played a big role in that experience. As a trainee, I participated in both the Speed Mentoring and One-to-One Mentoring programs, and those early conversations made SMDM feel much more approachable. Years later, when I was on the faculty job market, many of the people I reached out to were people I had first met through SMDM. One of those connections—Ashley Leech, whom I met at an SMDM networking event—is now my colleague at Vanderbilt. Serving as a co-chair of the CDC now feels like coming full circle: a chance to help create the same welcoming community that shaped my own career.

Looking back, all three of us started out simply attending SMDM. We didn’t expect that a mentoring conversation, a volunteer opportunity, or a conference introduction would lead to friendships, collaborations, and career-long connections. The best part of SMDM isn’t just the science; it’s the people. If you’ve benefited from this community, we hope you’ll consider helping shape it for someone else, whether through the CDC or another committee. We’d love to have you join us!