Schwabe Symposium

2024 Schwabe award 

The 2024 Calvin W. Schwabe award was awarded to Jan M. Sargeant, Professor Emerita at the Ontario Veterinary College, University of Guelph. Jan’s primary areas of research were linking research methodologies and approaches across disciplines and among animal health and human health communities, and evidence synthesis in veterinary medicine and public health. Jan is an author or co-author on over 260 publications. She is a co-lead and co-author of the REFLECT, PetSORT, and STROBE-Vet reporting guidelines for clinical trials and observational studies in animal populations. Jan was the founding Director of the Centre for Public Health and Zoonoses (2007-2019) at the University of Guelph. In 2017, she became a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences.

Speakers at the 2024 Schwabe symposium (from left to right): Audrey Ruple, Annette O’Connor, Jan Sargeant, David Renter.

The theme of the 2024 Schwabe symposium was “Remaining relevant:
Conceptual advances in research in animal populations”, with presentations by Dr. Sargeant and her colleagues Annette O’Connor (Michigan State University), Audrey Ruple (Virginia Tech), and David Renter (Kansas State University). The agenda, and links to publications in Frontiers in Veterinary Science resulting from the presentations, are as follows.

Jan Sargeant: What question are we trying to answer? Embracing causal inference

Annette O’Connor: Rethinking variable selection and study design approaches

Audrey Ruple: Do our exposure variables tell us what we think they are telling us?

David Renter: Aligning valid research outcomes with stakeholder values