From the airplane window high above Albany, NY, the patches of red and yellow foliage looked like an impressionist painting—a grand, bird’s-eye view not unlike HLN’s vantage point across public health systems. Touching down, however, brought the true landscape into focus. Attending the 2026 Northeast Epidemiology Conference and engaging directly with regional epidemiologists made one thing immediately clear: the passion, technical rigor, and tireless work powering our communities are stronger than ever. My colleague Emily Schneider attended the conference with me and presented our work at one of the sessions.
The opening address set an optimistic tone that resonated across every session—and certainly made sure we all penciled in a return trip to Albany in the spring to catch the capital’s natural beauty and its famous Tulip Festival. Throughout the event, two priorities consistently took center stage: the indispensable value of reliable data and the urgency of local-level preparedness.
The plenary sessions were both impactful and grounded, directly spotlighting the vital field work carried out by frontline practitioners. With over 650 registrants, the energy was palpable. Attendees arrived armed with laptops and dove straight into hands-on technical sessions covering Tableau, geocoding, and R fundamentals.
During the “Informatics in Action: Geospatial Mapping, Electronic Reporting and Regional Planning” session, HLN presented “Drinking from a Fire Hose: Leveraging AI to Visualize Complex Public Health Workflows.” We shared practical learnings from our business analysis work on a project that used AI to streamline requirements documentation for an agency operating multiple siloed systems that needed to be unified into a single cohesive solution. This sparked several vibrant discussions on the future of artificial intelligence in public health. The prevailing consensus was clear: AI is here to stay and offers powerful efficiencies, but it will never replace the indispensable need for the human eye to validate context and confirm accuracy.
Across the presentations and poster sessions, engaging with researchers on their methodologies—from hypothesis generation to data curation—reaffirmed another fundamental truth: analytical rigor hinges entirely on clean data. Lingering issues like record duplication don’t just distort cohort sizes; they compromise entire analytical frameworks.
On the flight home, I dove into Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green, warmly recommended by Dr. Katie Anderson, Commissioner of the Onondaga County Health Department. It did not disappoint.
Settling back into routine, one quote from the conference continues to linger in my mind: “Public health is radical, purposeful, creative, fun, and very much alive.”