It was originally proposed in 1967 by Abraham Lilienfeld, Milton Terris, and Brian MacMahon, and was founded the following year.
[2] Their motivation in founding SER was to provide an annual meeting where junior faculty in epidemiology departments and graduate students could present their ongoing research to senior epidemiologists and receive criticism, comments, and encouragement.
[1] In 2021, Onyebuchi A. Arah was elected as a president of the society; he became president-elect on July 1 of that year.
Annual meetings have been held since 1968, and consist of presentations of ongoing research, a keynote address on a topic of current interest, and instructional workshops prior to the conference that began in the 1980s.
Abstracts presented at SER meetings are annually published in a supplemental issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.