Associate Professor Victoria Stodden will present her research at A University Symposium: Promoting Credibility, Reproducibility and Integrity in Research on December 9 at Columbia University. Hosted by Columbia's Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and other New York City research institutions, the symposium will bring together leading experts, journal editors, funders, and researchers to discuss how issues of reproducibility and research integrity are being handled by institutions, journals, and federal agencies.
Stodden will participate in the session, "Repeat After Me: Current Issues in Reproducibility," with Jeffrey Drazen, editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine; Hany Farid, professor and chair of computer science at Dartmouth; Leonard Freeman, president of the Global Biological Standards Institute; and Londa Schiebinger, John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford. Stodden and the other experts will present examples of irreproducibility from their various disciplines and discuss ways of identifying, managing and avoiding such problems.
According to Stodden, several reasons exist for irreproducibility in empirical research, including, but not limited to, small study sizes, early or novel research without previously established evidence, poorly designed protocols that permit flexibility during the study, conflicts of interest, publication bias, and statistical biases.
Stodden is a leading figure in the area of reproducibility in computational science, exploring how we can better ensure the reliability and usefulness of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research. Her work addresses a wide range of topics, including standards of openness for data and code sharing, legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research, robustness in replicated findings, cyberinfrastructure to enable reproducibility, and scientific publishing practices. She serves as an associate editor for reproducibility for the Journal of the American Statistical Society and was recently invited to serve on the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Coordinating Committee.
At Illinois, she holds affiliate appointments at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA), College of Law, Department of Statistics, and Department of Computer Science. Stodden earned both her PhD in statistics and her law degree from Stanford University. She also holds a master's degree in economics from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Ottawa.