Barriers to reproducible research (and how to overcome them)
Kirstie Whitaker's talk at Cambridge Psychiatry Departmental Seminar on 27 September 2018 and Bernstein PhD Symposium on 29 September 2018.
Abstract: This talk will define reproducible research as analyses can be recreated in full by an independent scientist. Dr Whitaker will discuss the perceived and actual barriers experienced by researchers attempting to conduct reproducible research, and give practical guidance on how they can be overcome. The talk will include suggestions on how to make your code and data available and usable for others (including a strong suggestion to document both clearly so you don’t have to reply to lots of email questions from future users...or yourself when that revise and submit decision comes through!). Kirstie will cover a brief guide to version control, collaboration and dissemination using GitHub as well as a discussion of tools to help you work reproducibly from the start. Exercises and resources will be persistently available after the talk and all audience members will leave knowing there is something they can do to step towards making their research reproducible.
Bio: Kirstie Whitaker is a research fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (London, UK) and a senior research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD in Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley in 2012 and holds a BSc in Physics from the University of Bristol and an MSc in Medical Physics from the University of British Columbia. Her postdoctoral work was conducted in the Brain Mapping Unit at the University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2017. Dr Whitaker uses magnetic resonance imaging to study child and adolescent brain development and is a passionate advocate for reproducible neuroscience. She is a Fulbright scholarship alumna and 2016/17 Mozilla Fellow for Science. Kirstie was named, with her collaborator Petra Vertes, as a 2016 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine. You can find more information at her lab website: whitakerlab.github.io.
