2025 Networking and Outreach Taskforce

Community Updates
1

Hello Everyone

Ece Bayram (@ecebayram ) and I are excited to announce Year 2 of the Networking & Outreach Task Force. This is a task force that was started last year by Gian Paul and myself and we hope to continue our desire to see this community expand and hopefully encourage meaningful engagement. For those of you who have a passion for networking, this is the Task Force for you!

We seek to expand the DCoP over the next year and increase engagement of existing members. We want to identify and recruit new members from diverse professional backgrounds and geographic regions, enhance collaboration opportunities, facilitate knowledge sharing, and support professional growth through targeted outreach efforts and networking activities. We want to create a robust support system for researchers and practitioners working with Parkinson’s Disease datasets, ultimately contributing to the advancement of research and clinical efforts in this field

These are our preliminary output goals are:

Membership Growth: Increase the number of new members by 20%

Engagement Metrics: Higher levels of participation in community activities such as webinars, discussion forums, and collaborative projects

Community Feedback: Gather feedback from members regarding the value and resources of the community

Professional Advancement: Evidence of career advancements and successful collaborations resulting from DCoP participation

We are looking for more community members to join us in our efforts to expand the community and create a more engaging environment for all members to thrive. We have exciting plans ahead: do consider to join.

Based on interest, members will be assigned to a certain project or task(s) to be completed over the course of the year. We will identify a flexible meeting schedule to monitor progress.

We hope to have our first meeting in July to solidify the goals, and firm up suggested concepts and projects (@jgottesman @gginnan). If you are interested in contributing to this initiative, we would be thrilled to have you. Please indicate your interest below or reach out to us with any questions!

Vida and Ece

3 Likes
2

I’m excited to contribute to this effort this year that @Vidash had started to co-lead from last year. I also want to add to what Vida shared that I’m personally a grumpy awkward introvert, but network and create connections like insane at work because i believe that’s the way to push science forward and create a platform for people from all backgrounds. we know the importance of collaborations beyond our local bubbles and want to create strong connections through this task force. hope you’ll be interested in sparing some of your time for the effort, or at minimal we’re always all ears for any ideas and feedback! stay engaged and share your voice!

2 Likes
3

feeling a bit lonely here! with the MDS sneaking up, wanted to slowly start sharing some of my networking tips here. before the congress, i think it helps to identify who you’re hoping to meet. do you have someone in mind for potential collaboration, career advice, job application, or just to say hi? it helps to reach out to them and see if they’ll be at mds and try to set up a short meeting. things get busy quick during mds, you may have to plan ahead to make sure you get to steal some of their time. otherwise, running into people at mds is not really a good plan as it’s a pretty big congress, if you had specific people in mind you wanted to make sure you meet. for any of those beforehand emails, simply stating who you are, why you want to meet them, with a couple potential days/slots for them to pick from is helpful. even if they say they’re not available or they won’t be at mds, at least you now have the introduction and your name in their heads. especially for collaborations and job applications, it really helps to meet with the junior people from the teams, as they’ll have the background info that might be helpful for you and they can give you tips on how to reach out to the “seniors” and stay in touch. also juniors are easier to be friends with of course, and we all need friends in our field :slight_smile: marking sessions & abstracts to check out before you head to the congress is a must. poster sessions are big and you may not get a chance to check everything out,. if you’re interested in meeting specific poster presenters you can reach out beforehand as poster presentations are gonna be different this year without printed posters at different slots.

1 Like