Themes of the
Challenges and opportunities for improvement for ethics committees and regulators, for publishers, for institutions and researchers, and for funders. Methods for measurement and for testing interventions.
Programme
We are pleased to present a diverse range of invited speakers, including Dr Kris Thayer, Director of the Integrated Risk Information Systems Division at the US Environmental Protection Agency; Dr Allison Harbin, freelance writer and editor whose blog describing her PhD experience has resonated with graduate students across disciplines; Sir Jim Smith, Director of Science at the Wellcome Trust, and Dr Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist concerned with the social and policy dimensions of translational research. Further details of these and other speakers are available here.
Our ambition has been to create a faculty of insiders and outsiders, of those immersed every day in the challenges of biomedical research and of others from outside this narrow world, that their perspective may bring new understanding to the problems we face.
The meeting will include an inaugural EQUATOR Doug Altman lecture by Prof Isabelle Boutron, Université Paris Descartes, France. As well as these invited speakers, submitted research (oral presentations and posters), we have created space for less traditional conference formats including so-called focus tracks. In these focus tracks we plan to combine short talks with the accompanying posters on specific topics, such as Improving research at the institutional level; in Education and Training; through preregistration, etc. – including a moderated discussion.
Pre-Conference Activities
ImprovScience Barcamp – Satellite ‚unconference’ on strategies for research improvement
Keynote and
Plenary Speakers
- Lisa Anne Bero University of Sydney | Sydney, Australia
- Isabelle Boutron Université Paris Descartes | Paris, France
- Anne-Marie Coriat Wellcome Trust | London, UK
- Lisa Debruine University of Glasgow | Glasgow, Scotland
- Daniele Fanelli London School of Economics and Political Science | London, UK
- Allison Harbin Post Ph.D. | New York, USA
- Jonathan Kimmelman McGill University | Montreal, Canada
- Frank F. Miedema Utrecht University & UMC Utrecht | Utrecht, The Netherlands
- Ivan Oransky New York University & Retraction Watch | New York, USA
- Vinay Prasad Oregon Health and Science University | Portland, USA
- Jim Smith Wellcome Trust | London, UK
- Kristina Thayer United States Environmental Protection Agency | Washington D.C., USA
Jonathan Kimmelman | McGill University
Jonathan Kimmelmann
Frank F. Miedema | Utrecht University & UMC Utrecht
Frank F. Miedema
Ivan Oransky | New York University & Retraction Watch
Ivan Oransky
Lisa DeBruin | University of Glasgow
Lisa DeBruin
Jim Smith | Wellcome Trust
Jim Smith
Lisa Anne Bero | The University of Sydney
Lisa Anne Bero
Kristina Thayer | United States Environmental Protection Agency
Kristina Thayer
Daniele Fanelli | London School of Economics
Daniele Fanelli
Anne-Marie Coriat | Wellcome Trust
Anne-Marie Coriat
Vinay Prasad | Oregon Health and Science University
Vinay Prasad
Allison Harbin | Post Ph.D.
Allison Harbin
Isabelle Boutron | Université Paris Descartes
Isabelle Boutron
Certification
ECTS
- for participation in congresses, symposia, conferences and similar events · 0.33 ECTS Credit Points will be credited per full day (approx. 8 hours),
- for half a conference day · 0.15 ECTS Credit Points will be credited.
- for the presentation of one’s own work, for example as a conference contribution · 1 ECTS Credit Point will be credited
The conference programme is usually sufficient proof for posters/presentations.
Berlin Chamber of Physicians
The scientific programme has been accredited by the Berlin Chamber of Physicians (Ärztekammer Berlin) as follows:
Thursday, 20 February 2020 – 3 credits of category B
Friday, 21 February 2020 – 6 credits of category B
Saturday, 22 February 2020 – 3 credits of category B
Therefore up to 12 credits can be achieved.
A certification of attendance will be sent to all attendees 2 weeks after the conference.
Scientific Programme
Committee
- Ginny Barbour Queensland University of Technology | Brisbane, Australia
- Lex Bouter Vrije Universiteit | Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- Isabelle Boutron Université Paris Descartes | Paris, France
- Ulrich Dirnagl BIH QUEST Center | Berlin, Germany
- Paul Glasziou Bond University | Gold Coast, Australia
- Sabine Kleinert The Lancet | London, UK
- Malcolm Macleod (Chair) University of Edinburgh | Edinburgh, Scotland
- Marcus Munafo University of Bristol | Bristol, UK
- Brian Nosek Center for Open Science & University of Virginia | Charlottesville, USA
- Daniel Strech BIH QUEST Center | Berlin, Germany
Lex Bouter | Vrije Universiteit
Lex Bouter
Isabelle Boutron | Université Paris Descartes
Isabelle Boutron
Ulrich Dirnagl | BIH QUEST Center
Ulrich Dirnagl
Paul Glasziou | Bond University
Paul Glasziou
Sabine Kleinert | The Lancet
Sabine Kleinert
Malcolm Macleod (Chair) | University of Edinburgh
Malcolm Macleod
Marcus Munafò | University of Bristol
Marcus Munafò
Brian Nosek | Center for Open Science & University of Virginia
Brian Nosek
Daniel Strech | BIH QUEST Center
Daniel Strech
Contact
Host
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
BIH QUEST Center
Charitéplatz 1
10117 Berlin, Germany
Local Organiser (PCO)
MCI Deutschland GmbH
MCI | Germany – Berlin
Markgrafenstr. 56
10117 Berlin, Germany
T: +49 30 20459220
F: +49 30 2045950
rec2020@mci-group.com
Registration
T: +49 30 20459566
rec2020-registration@mci-group.com
Project Management
Sarah Ecker
T: +49 30 20459220
rec2020@mci-group.com
Peter is a research fellow at the BIH QUEST Center in Berlin. He received his MD from Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and works on issues around reproducibility and openness of biomedical research.
Lisa A. Bero, PhD directs the Evidence, Policy and Influence Collaborative Research Program at the Charles Perkins Centre, with Research nodes in Bias, Evidence Synthesis and Pharmaceutical Policy. Professor Bero is Chair of Medicines Use and Health Outcomes, Faculty of Medicine and Health, School of Pharmacy,The University of Sydney. She was Co-Chair, Cochrane Governing Board from 2014-2018 and is currently Senior Editor, Cochrane Public Health and Health Systems Network. She has developed and validated methods for assessing bias in the design, conduct and dissemination of research on pharmaceuticals, tobacco, chemicals, and complex public health interventions. Prof. Bero has also conducted analyses to examine the dissemination and policy implications of research evidence. Her international activities include member and chair of the World Health Organization (WHO) Essential Medicines Committee and Cochrane Collaboration liaison to WHO. Prof. Bero serves on several committees related to conflicts of interest, evidence and decisions.
Isabelle Boutron is professor of epidemiology at the Université de Paris, head of the Methods Team (INSERM- Epidemiology and Statistics Research Centre-CRESS). She is deputy director of the French EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research) Centre, director of Cochrane France and co-convenor of the Bias Methods group of the Cochrane Collaboration. Her research focusses on meta-research, methodological issues of assessing interventions (blinding, external validity, complex interventions), transparency, reporting guidelines development and implementation and research synthesis. She is also coordinating the MiRoR projects (
Dr. Harbin is a writer, education activist, and public school teacher living in Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A. Upon completion of her Ph.D., she left academia to become a whistle-blower for graduate student exploitation on her blog Post-PhD. Today, around one million people worldwide continue to read her blog. Dr. Harbin is finishing her first book addressing the structural inequity inherent to most European and North American universities. Together with researcher Zoe Chan of Queens University in Canada, the first ethics board approved survey addressing graduate student exploitation was launched in May 2019, with a total of 3,000 respondents to date.
Dr Anne-Marie Coriat is Head of UK/EU Research Landscape at Wellcome. She has over 20 years’ experience working across research funders in strategic planning, policy, operational delivery and funding. She leads for Wellcome on supporting an environment in which research can flourish with a focus on research quality and developing a more positive culture for careers in research. Anne-Marie received a degree in chemistry and environmental science, was a research technician at Baylor College of Medicine and worked as a hospital biochemist before completing a PhD in developmental biology in Manchester. Prior to joining Wellcome, Anne-Marie was Director for Capacity, Skills and Infrastructure at the UK Medical Research Council and Chair of the Research Councils UK, Research Group.
Vinay Prasad MD MPH is a hematologist-oncologist and 
Daniel Strech, MD, PhD, born 1975, is full professor and since 2018 chairs a research group on “Translational Bioethics” at the QUEST-Center (Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, BIH – Berlin Institute of Health). He studied medicine and philosophy and worked for two years as a physician and researcher in the field of psychiatry. Since 2006, he worked full-time in the fields of research ethics and health policy analysis at the Universities of Tübingen, Zürich, and at Hannover Medical School. His work focuses on practice-oriented challenges in risk-benefit assessment, informed consent, and other areas of evidence-based decision making in research and health care.
Kristina Thayer is the 
Jim joined Wellcome in December 2016 as Director of Science and is now reviewing how best Wellcome can support science to achieve the best advances in knowledge and health. He also leads a research group at the Francis Crick Institute, where he studies inductive interactions in vertebrate development and applies the principles of developmental biology to stem cell differentiation.
Professor Paul Glasziou is Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Bond University was a part-time General Practitioner for 20 years. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Research in Evidence-Based Practice at Bond University and previously the Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford from 2003-2010. His key interests include identifying and removing the barriers to using high quality research in everyday clinical practice and more specifically on improving the clinical impact of publications by reducing the more than $85 Billion annual loss from unpublished and unusable research (Chalmers, Glasziou, Lancet 2009).
Brian Nosek is co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (
Prof Virginia (Ginny) Barbour is the Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group, and advisor to the library and the Office of Research Ethics & Integrity at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. In 2004 she was one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine. She was the journal’s first Chief Editor, ultimately becoming PLOS Medicine and Biology Editorial Director. She chaired the Committee on Publication Ethics from 2012-2017. She has a medical degree from Cambridge University, and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. She has participated in many publishing and ethics initiatives, including the DORA International Advisory board and the NHMRC’s Research Quality Steering Committee.
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 (
Professor Lex M Bouter, PhD, has a tenured chair in Methodology and Integrity at the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics of the Amsterdam University Medical Centers and the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities of the Vrije Universiteit. Before taking up the current position he was professor of Epidemiology. He served his university as its rector between 2006 and 2013. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the REWARD (REduce research Waste And Reward Diligence) Alliance and chair of the World Conferences on Research Integrity Foundation. Lex Bouter has supervised 75 PhD students, of whom to date 16 were appointed as professor.
Malcolm Macleod is Professor in Neurology and Translational Neuroscience at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences, University of Edinburgh. After training in Internal Medicine his PhD concerned the neuroprotective actions of FK506 and post-doctoral work in the Seckl lab defined a neuroprotective role for increased expression of the mineralocorticoid receptor. During a pivotal sabbatical year with Donnan at the National Stroke Research Institute in Melbourne he began an involvement with stroke clinical trials, and it was in an effort to identify suitable drugs for such clinical trials that he began to develop techniques to allow the systematic review and meta-analysis of data from animal studies.
Martin Reinhart is assistant professor in the Sociology of Science at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the German Center for Higher Education Research and Science Studies. He is the director of the Robert K. Merton Center for Science Studies and his work focuses on peer review and evaluation in science, on scientific misconduct, and on translational biomedical research.
Lisa DeBruine is a professor of psychology at the Univeristy of Glasgow. Her meta-science interests include team science (especially the Psychological Science Accelerator), open documentation, data simulation, web-based tools for data collection and stimulus generation, and teaching computational reproducibility. Her substantive research is on the social perception of faces and kinship. Her projects and tutorials are available at 
Dr. Stephanie Müller-Ohlraun is the administrative head of the QUEST Center for Transforming Biomedical Research at the Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, Germany.
At the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin Ulrich Dirnagl is Professor for Clinical Neurosciences and serves as Director of the Department of Experimental Neurology. Since 2017 he is also the founding director of the QUEST Center for Transforming Biomedical Research at the Berlin Institute of Health. QUEST aims at overcoming the roadblocks in translational medicine by increasing the value and impact of biomedical research through maximizing the quality, reproducibility, generalizability, and validity of research.
Sarah McCann is a postdoctoral research fellow at the BIH QUEST Center in Berlin. She trained in preclinical neuroprotection research utilising in vivo stroke models. During this time, she became aware of the issues surrounding the poor translation of results from animal experiments to clinical benefit. Her research has since focussed on using preclinical systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate the factors contributing to these issues, and ways to help improve the predictive potential of animal research in stroke and in biomedicine more broadly.
Bob Siegerink is an epidemiologist with lab training, who works as Principal Investigator at the Center for Stroke Research, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Together with his group he works on several projects aimed to unravel the causes and consequences of stroke and understand the potential of new treatments concepts. He provides methodological support to researchers from other research groups of the CSB, both clinical and preclinical. Besides his work in vascular neurology, Bob has a strong interest in research methodology, quality of research, causal inference and scientific integrity, which resulted in several scientific projects, courses and collaborations.
Jonathan Kimmelman, PhD, is James McGill Professor of Biomedical Ethics at McGill University, and directs the Biomedical Ethics Unit as well as his own research group, STREAM (Studies in Translation, Ethics and Medicine). Kimmelman’s research centers on ethical, policy, and scientific dimensions of clinical development. In addition to his book, Gene Transfer and the Ethics of First-in-Human Experiments (Cambridge Press, 2010), major publications have appeared in Science, JAMA, BMJ, and Hastings Center Report. Kimmelman received the Maud Menten New Investigator Prize (2006), a CIHR New Investigator Award (2008), a Humboldt Bessel Award (2014), and was elected a Hastings Center Fellow (2018). He has sat on various advisory bodies within the U.S. NHLBI and NIAID, served for four tours of duty on U.S. National Academies of Medicine committees, and chaired the International Society of Stem Cell Research Guidelines for Stem Cell Research and Clinical Translation revision task force 2015-16. His research has been covered in major media outlets, including NPR’s All Things Considered, STATNews, and Nature. Kimmelman is deputy editor at Clinical Trials, and serves as an associate editor at PLoS Biology.
Ivan Oransky, MD, is co-founder of Retraction Watch, vice president of editorial at Medscape, and distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur Carter Journalism Institute. He also serves as president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. Ivan previously was global editorial director of MedPage Today, executive editor of Reuters Health, and held editorial positions at Scientific American and The Scientist. A 2012 TEDMED speaker, he is the recipient of the 2015 John P. McGovern Medal for excellence in biomedical communication from the American Medical Writers Association, and in 2017 was awarded an honorary doctorate in civil laws from The University of the South (Sewanee).
Frank Miedema, PhD, professor of Immunology, is Vice Rector for Research and chair of the Utrecht University Open Science Program. He studied biochemistry in Groningen and obtained a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. After a career in biomedical (HIV/AIDS) research in Amsterdam, from January 2009 to March 2019 he was dean and vice chairman of the Executive Board at the University Medical Center Utrecht. He is one of the initiators of Science in Transition (2013) who argued that science and in particular the academic incentive and reward system is in need of fundamental reform to increase quality and impact. Next to Science for Science, the impact on society must be valued more and societal stakeholders should be involved more in the production of knowledge.