Association for Psychological Science Convention 2016

It's been years since I've attended the Association for Psychological Science (APS) annual meeting. My research interests have shifted since I started working for VA, and while many of the topics I study now are still relevant to psychological science, we often focus our limited travel dollars on conferences more directly relevant to health services research. I traveled to APS a couple of times on my own dime, but haven't done that for the past 3 or 4 years.

That being said, APS was always one of my favorite meetings to attend, and I love this organization. I get to network with fellow research psychologists. APS even gave me my first ever research award in 2010, which was just the validation I needed to decide that I wanted a career in research; previously, I worried that I wasn't that good at research, and thought of myself as a better teacher. So I'm super-excited that APS is in Chicago this year! Even though I didn't submit anything for presentation, I still plan to be there.

Friday, I received an email about the various workshops being offered at APS on Thursday, May 26 and Sunday, May 29. There are so many great ones, it's going to be difficult to narrow down. Here's just a few I would love to attend:

• The Theory and Practice of Machine Learning in Psychology: The What, Why, and How of a Powerful Statistical Technique (Thurs., 9:00am - 12:20pm)
• Structural Equation Modeling With Lavaan (Thurs., 12:00pm - 3:50pm) - I recently started using this package, which I'm thrilled to report is pretty user-friendly, but I'd love to learn more about using this package to its fullest
• Improving Reproducibility of Our Research Practices (Thurs., 1:00pm - 3:50pm) - including getting the most out of the Open Science Framework, which I blogged about the other day
• Using Psychological Science to Write With Clarity and Style (Thurs., 4:00pm - 5:20pm)
• Uses and Challenges of Mechanical Turk (Sun., 8:30am - 11:20am) - I'm seeing more and more research being conducted using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which is great place to do online research in a more diverse population
• Elegant Multilevel Modeling (Sun., 8:30am - 12:20pm)
• Methodological Approaches to Designing Adaptive Interventions in Mobile Health (Sun., 8:30am - 12:50pm)
• BayesFactor and JASP: A Fresh Way to Do Statistics (Sun., 10:00am - 12:50pm)- Bayesian statistics: the way of the future

Obviously, I can't go to all, and some listed above run concurrently, so I'd have to chose: SEM with Lavaan or Open Science Framework? Mechanical Turk, Multilevel Modeling, Mobile Health, or Bayesian? Anyone have a cloning machine so I can attend every workshop?