Students Reflect on Their ICFP Experiences

The 2025 International Conference on Family Planning (ICFP), the world’s largest scientific conference on family planning and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), took place on November 1–6, 2025, in Bogotá, Colombia. This biennial conference brought together over 800 organizations, 50 governments, and 2,000 scientific presentations. Among the conference’s 5,000+ participants were several students and recent alumni from the Bloomberg School’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. These students and early career researchers not only participated as meeting attendees and presenters but also played a pivotal role in the conference planning, administration, and onsite production. 

Planning for such a large international conference begins years in advance. This work is organized by several subcommittees, including the Scientific Subcommittee, which leads the development of the conference’s scientific program, overseeing abstract submissions, managing the review process, and shaping the final agenda. ICFP 2025 received a record-breaking 5,174 abstracts—the highest in the conference’s history. Organizing the review process of all submissions and grouping those accepted papers into cohesive oral and poster sessions was a monumental task. 

Carolina Cardona, ’22, MHS ’16, assistant scientist in Population, Family and Reproductive Health, served as co-chair of the ICFP Scientific Subcommittee and helped secure the participation of many department students for the conference planning and management. “It was an incredible opportunity to have so many PFRH students at ICFP,” notes Cardona. “Not just an opportunity for the students to experience ICFP, but an opportunity for ICFP to benefit from their immeasurable, thoughtful contributions. There is no way the conference Scientific Subcommittee could have produced such a robust and complex program without the tireless work of our PFRH students.”

Nicole La Ruta, MHS ’24, worked closely with the ICFP Scientific Subcommittee to create and manage databases that organized the scientific program. She supported the construction of the conference schedule in the planning platform software’s backend, which included creating and managing the conference tracks, sessions, moderators, and speakers—a monumental task. “Managing schedule conflicts was definitely one of the trickiest parts. With 1,400+ speakers, even a small change could ripple across multiple sessions; no one can be in two places at once,” she reflects. “At a conference like ICFP, conflict management is less about a single fix and more about having a repeatable system. With Carolina, we built and ran the day-to-day process for identifying and resolving conflicts aligned on what to prioritize, when to escalate, and how to communicate changes, so decisions were consistent and efficient.”

As abstracts were submitted, PhD candidates Haley Thomas and Andrea Rodriguez-Villafane joined the team that responded the many emails that came into ICFP's abstracts inbox, answering questions from researchers all over the world about their submissions. “This was the most demanding pre-conference task,” Thomas recalls. “Our team collectively responded to over a thousand emails, with volume ramping up significantly in the weeks before the conference.”

As part of the conference planning process, PhD candidate Charlotte Greenbaum and second-year MSPH student Pratik Neve took the lead on pairing junior researcher mentees with more senior mentors as part of the ICFP youth mentorship program. While the program is centered around ICFP, it aims to cultivate long-term relationships between mentors and mentees working in family planning and sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Once the conference was underway in Bogotá, PFRH students managed many of the major components of the scientific program. Greenbaum, La Rota, and Neve took turns supervising the judging of the poster competition at the poster sessions. “During the poster session, we would ensure that all the judges were present, provide them with information about how to judge the posters, and then compile the list of the top three posters from the judges for that session,” La Rota notes. “After all of the poster sessions, the top three winning posters from each session were notified, and their posters were displaced in the conference center prior to the closing ceremony.”

Thomas and Rodriguez-Villafane took the skills and expertise they gained from managing the abstract inbox into the conference hall itself as they worked at the Speaker Ready Counter, confirming that each researcher’s presentation slides were ready for their sessions, and handling last minute schedule changes with grace. Thomas is fluent in French, and Spanish is Rodriguez-Villafane’s first language. These skills were extremely helpful in communicating with attendees from all over the globe. “We did use Google Translate for some of the other languages,” Rodriguez-Villafane notes, but the language differences did not cause any issues or tension. “People were very kind, and grateful that we were there to help them. Even though there were so many things happening it once, it made me very happy to be there.” 

Along with their work ensuring a successful experience for conference presenters, Greenbaum, Thomas, and Neve were also presenters themselves.

Greenbaum presented two posters on research she worked on with Hopkins teams: one regarding marriage decision-making involvement among young women in Yemen, and the other regarding sexual health literacy and gender attitudes among young adolescent girls in Ethiopia. She also gave an oral presentation on research on the association between participation in a cash transfer program and intimate partner violence in South Sudan.

Thomas presented three pieces of research on behalf of the research teams she works with, including work on infertility-related research and a novel measurement method for partner dynamics among adolescents. Thomas also served as a panelist for the WHO Writing Workshop as a junior researcher with early experience in publishing.

Neve presented research on contraceptive needs among Rohingya refugees. His experience presenting his poster was a rewarding one. “It was a great experience engaging with attendees who shared thoughtful feedback and suggestions on my work,” he noted. “That feedback will be valuable for strengthening the research going forward.”

One thing all of the students involved with ICFP agreed on: their experience gave them a newfound understanding of and respect for the immense amount of logistics and details that go into planning and mounting a conference of this size. “The scale of the conference was striking,” notes Thomas. “Seeing the moving pieces from the inside gave me enormous appreciation for the planning committee's work.” Neve had a similar reaction to the conference’s scale. “This was my first conference experience,” he says, “I had not fully anticipated how large, diverse, and well-coordinated it would be.” 

Students also expressed gratitude for the unique opportunities participating in the conference presented to them. Rodriguez-Villafane said that being able to connect with faculty members on a more personal level was her ICFP highlight. “It is extremely rare that I get a chance to talk with faculty about things that are not my dissertation or my research. At the conference I had many dinners and conversations with faculty where we could just talk about life. That personal connection was my highlight.”

The conference attendees were Thomas’s highlight. “Being in the family planning space with people from around the world at such an uncertain time was genuinely moving,” she reflects. “It reinforced that we are never alone in this work, and I left feeling deeply inspired and energized.”

Greenbaum also drew inspiration from the conference participants. “One highlight of the whole experience was getting to meet and interact with researchers and advocates in the SRHR field from such a wide range of countries and backgrounds,” she says. “At my oral presentation for instance, I was able to meet researchers from Sudan, Pakistan, and Cameroon all working in fields closely aligned to my own. The conference was truly international and multilingual in every respect, and gave me a new appreciation for the importance of bringing together and collaborating with researchers from all regions and backgrounds.”

Jordan Freeman, a PhD candidate in the Department of International Health and Graduate Research Assistant at the William H. Gates Sr. Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, was part of the organizing team for the youth programming at the conference. A central theme that emerged for her was the deep impact of young people feeling seen through these international conferences. “I was told over and over again by many of the young people at the conference, including many early career researchers, that this was their first international conference and often their first time being recognized for their work on an international stage,” Freeman notes. “For me, prioritizing young voices shifts power. It signals that youth are not just participants, but active shapers of the field, whose ideas, experiences, and leadership have real influence. They are not only in the room, but they are leading conversations and shaping the future.” 

ICFP 2025 was more than a conference for PFRH students. It was a formative professional experience that blended rigorous scientific exchange with behind-the-scenes leadership, collaboration, and service. By contributing directly to the planning and execution of a global convening while also sharing their own research, PFRH trainees gained perspective on how evidence, logistics, and relationships come together to advance sexual and reproductive health and rights worldwide. Their work not only strengthened the success of ICFP 2025 but also exemplified PFRH’s commitment to training the next generation of scholars and practitioners who are prepared to lead, collaborate across borders, and shape the future of the field.

ICFP 2025 was hosted by William H. Gates Sr. Institute for Population and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Government of Colombia, Profamilia, and Fundación Valle del Lili.

Photos contributed by Haley Thomas, Andrea Rodriguez-Villafane, and Charlotte Greenbaum.