Category: ΨMCA Information

Applicants occasionally ask for feedback about their applications and advice about what they can do to strengthen their applications in future years. We don’t provide written feedback to applicants because of the volume of work this would require for the review committee, who all are volunteering their time. But we are happy to provide more information about how we review applications and make selections.

We try to achieve a balance of conference participants across multiple dimensions. We try to include people who have strong methodological skills as well as people who have expertise in substantive science related to the conference theme. We actively seek a mix of people at different training/experience levels and coming from different disciplines. We seek diversity across demographic characteristics, and value inclusion of women and underrepresented minorities. The fit of the individual applicant to the conference theme is always a primary consideration. Our overarching model for conference workgroups is that they represent team science where all workgroup members, regardless of their background, make contributions to the scientific output of the group and learn new skills that will advance their future cognitive aging research.

The conference Organizing Committee also serves as the Application Review Committee. All have substantial experience in cognitive aging research and with past conferences. Many have been involved with this program since the beginning but we have also added more junior members who attended and excelled in previous conferences. While we all share common goals of promoting cognitive aging research and building a diverse workforce for this research, we have different ideas about what an ideal candidate for a specific conference might be. The application review and selection process is designed so that this diversity is built into the review and informs the selection process.

Each application is reviewed by at least three committee members. In 2022, there were 9 reviewers for 163 applications. Reviewers are randomly assigned to applications with a constraint that 3 different reviewers have to be assigned to each application. Some reassignment is subsequently done so that reviewers have approximately the same number of assignments. Applications are reviewed independently and each reviewer assigns a score from 1-5 to each application with the scores representing the fit of the applicant to the conference (1 = strongest, 5 = weakest). These scores are averaged across the 3+ raters and applications are rank ordered by the averaged rating within 6 groups: Graduate Students, Postdoctoral Trainees, K Awardees, Research Scientists, Assistant Professors/Junior Faculty, and Associate/Full Professors/Senior Faculty. We have a target for number of applicants to select from each of these groups, and this target may vary somewhat from year to year. We then use the rank orderings within each group to identify a preliminary acceptance list. Each reviewer then makes nominations for individuals to add to, or infrequently, remove from the acceptance list. We then have a Review Committee meeting where all of the nominations are discussed. The reviewer making the nomination leads the discussion, and the group arrives at a consensus decision about each nominated application and about the final acceptance list.

Notification of application status occurred on March 31, 2022.

We are accepting applications for ΨMCA 2022 (Moving toward best practices for research on racial and ethnic inequalities in cognitive aging and dementia). Information about the meeting is at Conference Overview. Information about applying is at Application Instructions.

Welcome to the new website for the Advanced Psychomteric Methods in Cognitive Aging Research conference and workshop series. We have moved our website to a new platform with a new name (psymca.org). You can continue to view archived material from previous conferences in the Conferences by Year menu. Check out how substantive science in cognitive aging and psychometric and statistical methods have evolved since 2004.