Speakers for Better Science Ideathon

Speakers at the Ideathon

Speakers

Andrew Gelman

Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis (with John Carlin, Hal Stern, David Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Don Rubin), Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deb Nolan), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (with Jennifer Hill), Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (with David Park, Boris Shor, and Jeronimo Cortina), and A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences (co-edited with Jeronimo Cortina).

Andrew has done research on a wide range of topics, including: why it is rational to vote; why campaign polls are so variable when elections are so predictable; why redistricting is good for democracy; reversals of death sentences; police stops in New York City, the statistical challenges of estimating small effects; the probability that your vote will be decisive; seats and votes in Congress; social network structure; arsenic in Bangladesh; radon in your basement; toxicology; medical imaging; and methods in surveys, experimental design, statistical inference, computation, and graphics.

Heather Piwowar

Heather Piwowar is a cofounder of Impactstory and a leading researcher in research data availability and data reuse. She wrote one of the first papers measuring the citation benefit of publicly available research data, has studied patterns in data archiving, patterns of data reuse, and the impact of journal data sharing policies. She is a frequent speaker on research data archiving, writes a well-respected research blog, and is active on twitter (@researchremix).

Jeff Spies

Jeff Spies the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the Center for Open Science (COS), a non-profit technology company missioned to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scholarly research. As CTO, Jeff is responsible for technical strategy, product vision, software architecture, external partner/funder development, and management of COS Labs — COS’s research and development team. Jeff also co-leads SHARE — an initiative by the Association of Research Libraries and COS to create a free, open dataset of research activity across the research life-cycle. Jeff has a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology (read: Behavioral Statistics) from the University of Virginia, where he now holds a Visiting Assistant Professor position in the Department of Engineering and Society. Jeff’s dissertation included the development of the Open Science Framework — a free, open source workflow management system and scholarly commons that is now the flagship product of COS.

John Ioannidis

John P.A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc holds the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, where he is Professor of Medicine, Professor of Health Research and Policy, and Professor (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science at the School of Medicine, Professor (by courtesy) of Statistics at the School of Humanities and Sciences, co-Director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford, and Director of the PhD program in Epidemiology and Clinical Research. He has delivered ~500 invited and honorary lectures and he is the recipient of many awards (e.g. European Award for Excellence in Clinical Science [2007], Medal for Distinguished Service, Teachers College, Columbia University [2015], Chanchlani Global Health Award [2017]). He has been inducted in the Association of American Physicians (2009), the European Academy of Cancer Sciences (2010), the American Epidemiological Society (2015), and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2015) and has served as President of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology. He has received honorary titles from FORTH (2014) and Ioannina (2015), honorary doctorates from Erasmus U Rotterdam (2015) and U Athens (2017) and multiple honorary lectureships/visiting professorships (Caltech, Oxford, LSHTM, Yale, U Utah, UConn, UC Davis among others). The PLoS Medicine paper on “Why most published research findings are false” has been the most-accessed article in the history of Public Library of Science (with >2.5 million hits to-date) and has generated new directions for assessing scientific efficiency, reliability, and reproducibility. He is a Highly Cited Researcher according to Clarivate Analytics in both Clinical Medicine and in Social Sciences and among the 10 scientists with the highest current citation rate in the world (currently about 3,000 new citations are made to his work each month in the scientific literature according to Google Scholar).

Ellen Finnie

Ellen Finnie is Head, Scholarly Communications & Collections Strategy in the MIT Libraries.
She leads the MIT Libraries’ scholarly communications and collections strategy in support of the Libraries’ and MIT’s objectives, including in particular efforts to influence models of scholarly publishing and communication in ways that increase the impact and reach of MIT’s research and scholarship and which promote open, sustainable publishing and access models. She leads a team focused on outreach efforts to the MIT community in support of scholarly publication reform and open access activities at MIT, and oversees copyright support services, content licensing policy and negotiations, and innovating in using the collections budget and purchasing power as a lever for positive change in the scholarly communications ecosystem. Ellen also hosts therapy dog events in the Libraries!

Joshua Hartshorne

Joshua is an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College Department of Psychology, where he directs the Language Learning Laboratory. His research focuses on understanding what allows humans, but not current machines, to learn language – and why it is that children, despite their salient limitations of both cognition and experience, are so much more successful at language learning than adults. He has a particular interest in applying new and emerging methods (such as computational modeling and crowdsourcing) to core problems in the language sciences.

Mentors

Jessica Polka

Jessica Polka, PhD is Director of ASAPbio, a biologist-driven project to promote the productive use of preprints in the life sciences. Before becoming a visiting scholar at the Whitehead Institute, she performed postdoctoral research in the department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School following a PhD in Biochemistry from UCSF. Jessica serves as president of the board of directors of Future of Research, a steering committee member of Rescuing Biomedical Research, a member of the NAS Next Generation Researchers Initiative, and a member of ASCB’s public policy committee.

Naomi Penfold

Naomi is Innovation Officer at eLife. Coming from a neuroscience research background, she now spends her work life scouting for and supporting open source projects for open science. More broadly, Naomi believes in the potential of the web to make research a more equitable and effective enterprise.

Mercè Crosas

Mercè Crosas is the Chief Data Science and Technology Officer at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. She has more than 10 years of experience leading the Dataverse project and more than 15 years of experience building data management and analysis systems in academia and biotechnology companies. She is part of numerous committees and working groups focused on data sharing, research data management, data citation, and data standards. Crosas is co-PI of the Dataverse Project, with IQSS director Gary King, and supervises the Consilience project for text analysis, the Data Science Services, and Data Curation team at IQSS. She collaborates with a wide range of data related projects, including the NIH Data Commons, Harvard Privacy Tools, DataTags, Data Provenance, the Structural Biology Grid Data, Cloud Dataverse with the Massachusetts Open Cloud, and the Boston Area Research Initiative, among others.

Leonie Mueck

Leonie studied chemistry at the University of Marburg and at St Petersburg State University specializing in computational chemistry. She undertook her doctoral work in Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Mainz, graduating in 2013. Cofounding a student-led journal for negative and null results, she became interested in publishing and the Open Access movement. After graduation, she joined what is now Springer Nature to work as a manuscript editor for Nature Communications and moved to Nature in 2014 where she handled manuscripts from fundamental physics. In 2017, Leonie joined PLOS ONE where she is tasked with building a physical sciences division.

Read more at:

https://betterscience.mit.edu/speakers/