About me

Who am I?

• I am a Senior Researcher at the Center for Reproducible Science (CRS) at the University of Zurich (UZH), and

  • teach Good Research Practices to PhD Students and other postdocs at the UZH Graduate Campus.
  • organize the CRS ReproducibiliTea Journal Club.
    
  • am a board member and vice-president of the Swiss Statistical Society
  • am part of the steering committee of the CoARA working group on metrics and indicators.

• Before, I was a postdoctoral fellow, and before that I worked as a statistician in the Data Team of the Swiss National Science Foundation.

• And before that, in January 2019, I defended my PhD in the “Epidemiology and Biostatistics” Structured PhD Program.

• Now, I am interested in meta-research, Reproducibility, Open Science and Data, incentives for Good Research Practice and research software engineering. I generally want to make research more reproducible and improve research evaluation!

What is Meta-Research?

Meta-research has been defined as the interdisciplinary study of research itself (link). Sounds pretty meta, right?

What’s wrong with research evaluation?

Well, where should I start? In short, funding and hiring decisions in research are based on peer review. However, peer review has been shown to be inefficient, biased and unreliable. A good resource to start reading up on what’s wrong with (grant) peer review is Guthrie et al. (2018). On top of that there is a misalignment between the evaluation criteria used by funding bodies, which often emphasis quantity of publications/citations over quality of research, and the desired outcome which should be “good, transparent and reproducible research”. We therefore need alternative criteria for excellence that align with Good Research Practice and need to acknowledge the bias and uncertainty in peer review when making funding decisions.