PPP Otto Wolff Lecture 2020 (online)

PPP Otto Wolff Lecture 2020

Research Ecosystems and Incentives

8 OCTOBER 2020, 2 to 3:30 pm

Speaker: Marcus Munafò, Professor of Biological Psychology, University of Bristol

Discussant: Andrew Pickles, Professor of Biostatistics and Psychological Methods, King’s College London

Marcus Munafò is Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Bristol, and Programme Lead within the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit. Together with Angela Attwood and Olivia Maynard, he leads the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (http://www.bristol.ac.uk/psychology/research/brain/targ/). His research interests focus on causal influences on and consequences of health behaviours, using approaches that include epidemiology, human laboratory studies, and field trials. He is also interested in how current incentive structures within science shape the behaviour of scientists, and have an impact on the quality of published work. He recently, together with colleagues from Cardiff, Oxford, Imperial College and Edinburgh, established the UK Reproducibility Network.

Andrew Pickles’ s career has passed through universities in the UK and US and has spanned natural, social and medical sciences with spells in Depts of Planning, Geography, Child Psychiatry as well Epidemiology and Biostatistics. A collaboration with Sophia Rabe-Hesketh led to the development of the gllamm program (developed as Stata’s gsem) and the framework for multilevel generalized structural equation modelling, with a focus on both the accounting for measurement error but also reliable inference in the presence of confounders. Long-term collaborations in the field of developmental epidemiology – the understanding of the patterns and mechanisms underlying human normal and abnormal behavioural development – have provided much opportunity to observe the tensions between careful observation, sensitive data exploration, career progression and reproducibility.