Get involved with Reproducible Research Oxford
Five new UKRN Local Network Leads have been appointed to champion and support open and transparent research practices across the University of Oxford, as part of Oxford’s commitment to the UK Reproducibility Network. The University has appointed them following an open call for expressions of interest.
The new team of Local Network Leads will lead and expand Reproducible Research Oxford (RROx), the existing local network of UKRN at Oxford, which is a grassroots collective of students and staff aiming to grow awareness of open research across the collegiate University (click here to get involved with RROx.) They will work closely with Professor Laura Fortunato, who serves as the University’s Academic Lead for Research Culture (UKRN), and with colleagues in the research practice team in Research Services. The new Local Network Leads will work collaboratively to engage and expand this community at Oxford via networking, training, and other events and activities. They will also liaise with senior University leadership to identify current and future need in this area.
The UKRN Local Network Leads are a diverse team from a range of career stages, roles, and disciplines:
Gaurav Bhalerao (ORCID link) is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychiatry working in neuroimaging. As part of his interests in promoting reproducible and reliable research software and code, he holds a Software Sustainability Institute fellowship and is part of the Code Reproducibility (CodeRep) training project.
Marc Brouard (ORCID link) had over 30 years of experience in the IT industry before starting an academic career. He completed a DPhil and postdoc in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, collecting and modelling ecological data and archiving research, and now works as a research software engineer with the Nuffield Department of Medicine in the Modernising Medical Microbiology group, working on pathogen genetic data. He is interested in helping researchers improve data handling.
Mae Chester-Jones (ORCID link) is a medical statistician and first-year DPhil candidate in Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, with experience in both clinical trials and observational studies. In her role as a DPhil student, she has observed both the barriers early career researchers face in implementing open research (from lack of awareness to lack of senior support), as well as their enthusiasm for these practices. She is interested in developing training and collaborative learning opportunities to help researchers at Oxford to ensure their research is reproducible.
Patricia Logullo (ORCID link) is a postdoctoral researcher in Centre for Statistics in Medicine. Since 2018 she has worked with the UK EQUATOR Centre group, teaching responsible, reproducible, and open science principles. Her prior experience as a scientific journalist and medical writer in Brazil has given her direct perspectives on diversity and challenges of research in developing countries. She is passionate about raising awareness of the value of reproducing research to improve the rigour of knowledge generation.
Charles Rahal (ORCID link) is a Senior Departmental Research Lecturer in Computational Social Science within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. He is passionate about building new open and transparent methods through his own work, by creating new publicly available and open-source data and software libraries. He also actively promotes and teaches these practices to students and other researchers via formal taught models and short courses.
Additionally, three researchers have been selected as “liaison points” between the Local Network Leads and the broader RROx community, with a focus on specific areas of activity:
Lazaros Belbasis (ORCID link) will be leading the ReproducibiliTea journal club at Oxford, which provides researchers with an academic space to informally discuss issues related to Open Science and Research Reproducibility and an opportunity to the improve their research practice. Lazaros is a physician-scientist who recently joined the Nuffield Department of Population Health as an Early Career Research Fellow, examining the reproducibility of research findings in the field of neuroepidemiology. He is also an affiliate scientific member at the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford.
Allyson Lister (ORCID link) will lead on projects related to FAIRsharing, a curated educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies, across all disciplines. Allyson is the FAIRsharing Content and Community Lead within the Data Readiness Group at the Oxford e-Research Centre.
Ruth Nanjala (ORCID link) will be liaising with RROx on Software Carpentries training, an initiative which helps researchers learn key coding skills. Ruth is a DPhil candidate in Molecular and Cellular Medicine, and has previously worked on several initiatives training Bioinformatics researchers in open research practices. She is a certified Carpentries instructor.
Please get in touch and get involved! RROx is always looking for new members to join the mailing list and to take part in its wide range of initiatives. To sign up, or to learn more about RROx, visit the website at https://ox.ukrn.org/. To contact the Local Network Leads, please email: rrox-steering@maillist.ox.ac.uk
