My experience in the EUPHAnxt Mentoring Programme

I am a doctoral researcher based in Granada, Spain, where I study West Nile virus epidemiology at the University of Granada, within a One Health and Planetary Health framework.

I applied to the EUPHAnxt Mentoring Programme without a specific technical problem to solve. My PhD question was already defined: how West Nile virus circulates in southern Spain, and what that says about climate, land use and vector-borne disease risk in Europe. My problem was more basic than that. I did not know how to move around European public health as a field. Which meetings are worth attending, which ones are worth the money, and how other people in my position manage to be there at all.

I was matched with Dr Ricardo Mexia, a public health physician and field epidemiologist at the Department of Epidemiology of the National Institute of Health Doutor Ricardo Jorge in Lisbon, where he works on infectious disease surveillance and preparedness. He has led the EUPHA Infectious Disease Control Section, was president of the Portuguese Association of Public Health Physicians, and chaired the 17th EPH Conference in Lisbon in 2024. He also does a lot of science communication in the Portuguese media.

Much of what we discussed was practical. Which conferences fit the kind of work I do, which ones are worth prioritising at this stage rather than later, and what routes exist to actually pay for them: travel grants, bursaries for early-career researchers, opportunities that come through EUPHA sections and through national associations. None of that is glamorous, and none of it appears in a thesis. But it is the kind of information that mostly circulates informally among people who are already inside the network, which is exactly why having someone to ask is useful.

What I take from the programme is less a change of perspective than a clearer map. I have a better sense of where the field meets, what is realistic to aim for in the next two years, and who to ask when I do not know something. Having a mentor did not make any of it happen for me, but it removed a fair amount of guessing.

The conversation is not finished either. We agreed to meet in person at the 19th EPH Conference in Bilbao in November, so the next step is a coffee rather than a video call.

If you are thinking about applying, my only advice is to be specific about what you do not know. My questions were fairly unglamorous ones about conferences and funding, and those turned out to be the useful ones to ask.