A Tale of Two Anachronisms
What does replicable ‘real world’ evidence from ‘real world’ data look like?
Shirley Wang is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Associate Epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is a pharmacoepidemiologist focused on developing innovative, non-traditional analytic methods to understand the safety and effectiveness of medication use in clinical care as well as facilitating the appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. To that end, she has developed enhancements to epidemiologic study designs and analytic methods as well as led efforts to guide the appropriate use of complex methods for analyzing large observational healthcare data. Shirley has been involved with the US Food and Drug Administration’s Sentinel Initiative since 2011 and her methods work has been recognized with awards from two international research societies. She recently co-led a joint task force for the International Society for Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) focused on improving the credibility of real-world evidence for decision-makers and launched the REPEAT Initiative, a non-profit program with projects designed to improve transparency, reproducibility and ability to assess the validity of healthcare database studies. Shirley is also a writing group member for a National Academy of Medicine white paper on executing and operationalizing open science.
Scientific Polarization
Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of biology and behavioral sciences, philosopher of science, and evolutionary game theorist. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at UC Irvine. She is currently administering the NSF grant Social Dynamics and Diversity in Epistemic Communities. Her book The Misinformation Age was published with Yale University Press. It has been covered in the New York Times, on Hidden Brain, and on The Open Mind. Her monograph The Origins of Unfairness will be published with OUP in summer 2019. Cailin is also a sometime science writer. When not busy doing philosophy, she is a poultry enthusiast and aerial acrobat. Her Erdos-Bacon number is 7.
How to produce credible research, on anything
Zoltan Kekecs is an assistant professor at ELTE. Earlier he worked as a post-doctor at Baylor University, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience; at Imperial College London, Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, and at Lund University, Institute of Psychology. His research focuses on the efficacy and underlying psychophysiological mechanisms of medical hypnosis. He also leads the ELTE and Lund Research Credibility Workgroups, aiming to develop tools and methodologies that can enhance the credibility of research in psychological science. His professional accomplishments have been recognized by the Early Career Achievement Award from the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. He is also active in professional societies: Since 2018 he is a methodologist and member of the Data and Methods Committee of the Psychological Science Accelerator, and he is an elected officer of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. Earlier he was the treasurer of the American Psychological Association Division 30.
Collaboration patterns in science
Marta Sales-Pardo graduated in Physics at Universitat de Barcelona in 1998 and obtained a Ph.D. in Physics from Universitat de Barcelona in 2002. She then moved to Northwestern University, where she first worked as a postdoctoral fellow and, later, as a Fulbright Scholar. In 2008, she became a Research Assistant Professor at the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Science Institute with joint appointments in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. In 2009, she accepted her current position as in the Departament d’Enginyeria Química at Universitat Rovira i Virgili. In 2013 she received an ICREA Acadèmia Award for excellence in research.
Tim Errington is the Director of Research at the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA that has a mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. In this role, Tim collaborates with researchers and stakeholders across scientific disciplines and organizations on projects aimed to understand the current research process and to evaluate initiatives designed to increase reproducibility and openness of scientific research. Tim earned a B.S. degree in both Biology and Chemistry from St. Lawrence University, an M.A. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Microbiology, Immunology, and Cancer Biology from the University of Virginia.
Annette Brown is the Principal Economist at FHI 360, an international non-profit working to improve the health and well-being of people around the world through research and program implementation. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief, and frequently writes for, FHI 360’s R&E Search for Evidence blog. Annette’s career in international development has spanned academe, non-profits, and for-profits. For the last decade she has focused on supporting and promoting the use of high-quality evidence for programs and policy. Her current research interests include the role and practice of replication research and the systematic review of evidence across a variety of topics. She has published in numerous social science and public health journals, and recently co-guest-edited a special journal section on replication of development impact evaluations. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan as a National Science Foundation Fellow and a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Grinnell College.
Checking Robustness in 4 Steps
Michèle B. Nuijten is an Assistant Professor at the Meta-Research Center at Tilburg University, where she studies reproducibility and replicability in psychology. She received her PhD in Methodology and Statistics at Tilburg University in 2018. Her PhD thesis, titled “Research on Research: A Meta-Scientific Study of Problems and Solutions in Psychological Science”, was awarded the Tilburg University Dissertation Prize. As part of her research, Michèle co-developed the free tool statcheck; a “spellchecker” for statistics. Statcheck has gained popularity as a pre-publication check: since its launch in 2016, the web app was visited tens of thousands times, and the journals Psychological Science and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology have made statcheck a standard element in their peer-review process. Besides her research, Michèle is closely involved with the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS), having been a member of the executive committee, and past-chair of the program committee. She is also part of the Program Committee Replication Research of The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, advising them on distributing funding for replication research.