Speakers
About the chairs/speakers
Prof. Dorothy Bishop
St John's College, Oxford
Dorothy Bishop recently retired as Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology at the University of Oxford, where she conducted full-time research, funded by Wellcome Trust and ERC (Orcid ID: 0000-0002-2448-4033).
She is an honorary fellow of St John’s College Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences. She resigned as a Fellow of the Royal Society in November 2024.
She has published substantial books and papers on the nature and causes of developmental language disorder, focusing on psycholinguistics, neurobiology and genetics. Beyond psychology, she is active in the field of open science and research reproducibility, and in retirement has taken up academic fraud-busting. She is active on social media, @deevybee.bsky.social and @deevybee on mastodon.social) and has a popular blog, Bishopblog (https://deevybee.blogspot.com)
Prof. Jaideep Pandit
St John's College, Oxford
Jaideep Pandit is Professor of Anaesthesia at the University of Oxford (NHS Consultant in Oxford since 1999).
He trained in Medicine at Oxford (Corpus Christi College) and obtained a First in Physiology along with University prizes in Medicine, Cardiology and Clinical Pharmacology. After a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship (DPhil, Respiratory Physiology), he trained in anaesthesia in Oxford. He was Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA (1998-9), and elected to St John’s 2000.
Jaideep is Clinical Director of Operating Theatres at Oxford University Hospitals and also for Operating Theatres across the new NHS Integrated Care System that includes hospitals in Reading and Wycombe. Since 2023, he is Editor-in-Chief of the leading journal Anesthesia & Analgesia; the first based outside North America in over 100 years of the journal’s history.
Prof. Sir Rory Collins
St John's College, Oxford
Rory studied Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, London University (1974-1980), and Statistics at George Washington University (1976-7) and at the University of Oxford (1982-3).
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In 1985 he became co-director, with Professor Sir Richard Peto, of the University of Oxford's Clinical Trial Service Unit & Epidemiological Studies Unit (CTSU). In 1996, he was appointed Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Oxford, supported by the British Heart Foundation.
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He became Principal Investigator and Chief Executive of the UK Biobank prospective study of 500,000 people in September 2005. From July 2013, he became the Head of the Nuffield Department of Population Health at Oxford University.
His work has been in the establishment of large-scale epidemiological studies of the causes, prevention and treatment of heart attacks, other vascular disease, and cancer. He was knighted in 2011 for his services to science.
Dr Nick Brown
Linnaeus University, Sweden
Nick Brown is a visiting fellow in the Department of Psychology at Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden, which is ironic as he has never actually visited there.
He holds a BA in Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Cambridge (UK), a Master's in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of East London (UK), and a PhD in Health Psychology from the University of Groningen (Netherlands). He has lived in the Netherlands and France, and now lives in Spain.
Nick specialises in the detection of errors — whether honest or otherwise — in published results and datasets, as well as the detection of plagiarism. His work has led to many retractions and featured in a few high-profile academic scandals.
In 2025 Nick is celebrating 50 years of writing code, having started with handwritten coding forms on an ICL 1906A mainframe and punched cards on a PDP-11/40. Do not ask him about this if you are in a hurry to get somewhere.
Elisabeth Bik, PhD
Harbers Bik LLC, San Francisco, CA, USA
Elisabeth Bik, PhD is a Dutch-American microbiologist who has worked for 15 years at Stanford University and 2 years in industry.
Since 2019, she is a science integrity volunteer and consultant who scans the biomedical literature for images or other data of concern and has found over 8,000 problematic scientific papers.
She can often be found discussing science papers on social media, writing for her blog ScienceIntegrityDigest, or searching the biomedical literature for inappropriately duplicated or manipulated photographic images and plagiarized text.
Her work has been featured in Nature, Science, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and The Times (UK). Her work has resulted in over 1,300 retracted and another 1,000 corrected papers. For her work on exposing threats to research integrity, she received the 2021 John Maddox Prize and the 2024 Einstein Foundation Award.
Prof. Jennifer Byrne
University of Sydney
Jennifer Byrne was awarded the University Medal for her BSc (Hons) studies at the University of Queensland, where she also obtained her PhD in cancer genetics. Jennifer is currently Director of Biobanking - NSW Health, and Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Sydney, Australia, where she leads the PRIMeR group (Publication and Research Integrity in Medical Research).
Her background in human gene discovery led her to first propose the existence of fraudulent cancer research publications that target human genes. Jennifer was recognised by Nature as one of “10 people who mattered in 2017” and was invited to contribute a Nature World View editorial on systematic research fraud in 2019.
Her team’s recent papers/preprints were profiled by Nature or Science News in 2021, 2023 and 2024, including their recent discovery of publications that describe non-verifiable human cell line models. Jennifer has led consecutive grants on systematic research fraud from the US Office of Research Integrity (2018-2019) and the NHMRC (2020-2027) and was one of 3 experts who testified before US Congress at the 2022 congressional hearing into paper mills and research misconduct.
Prof. Patricia Murray
Dept of Women’s and Children’s Health, University of Liverpool
For the first seven years of her career, Patricia worked as a registered nurse on a Head and Neck ward at the Royal Liverpool Hospital. In 1994 she joined the University of Liverpool (UoL), graduating in 1997 with a first-class BSc in Molecular Biology. She undertook a PhD degree at UoL in the field of stem cells, and in 2002 was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship that enabled her to establish an independent research group.
She obtained her professorship in stem cells and regenerative medicine in 2015. She is interested in scientific integrity and research ethics. She opposes the inappropriate use of stem cell therapies and with colleagues has advocated for stricter regulations to protect patients. Her concerns regarding some high profile cases have been reported in Science, the BMJ, BBC, the Telegraph, Private Eye and the For Better Science blog.
She has received cease and desist letters threatening legal action by 3 UK companies after making her concerns public. She served as an expert witness in the trial of the surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who transplanted so-called “stem cell” engineered tracheas into patients, with fatal consequences. He was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for patient abuse. She received the annual HealthSense Award in recognition of her campaigning for scientific integrity and work exposing research misconduct.
Dr Peter Wilmshurst
Cardiologist
Peter is a cardiologist who has received international awards for his research.
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He has investigated and reported misconduct for 40 years. His reports have resulted in retraction of publications, imposition of sanctions on dishonest doctors and withdrawal of a drug worldwide. He has been threatened with legal actions by pharmaceutical corporations, academic institutions and individual doctors. He has successfully defended four libel claims brought by a medical device corporation, which were a catalyst for the legal reforms in the UK Defamation Act 2013.
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A seminar he gave at the BMJ for journal editors in 1996 was a driver for the foundation of the Committee on Publication Ethics in 1997. He gave oral evidence on research misconduct to Parliament’s Health Select Committee and to the Science and Technology Committee. He was awarded the 2003 Annual Health Watch Award “in recognition of his dogged and selfless pursuit of the truth in medical research” and he was the first recipient of the BMJ Editors Award in 2012 for “persistence and courage in speaking truth to power”. He was first recipient of the Guardian of Truth and Integrity Award in 2022.
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A BMJ Editor’s choice described Peter as “British medicine’s champion whistle-blower” and Private Eye magazine described him as “the godfather of NHS whistle-blowers”.
Prof. Nancy Olivieri, MD, MA, MFA, FRCP(C)
Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine and Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto.
Since 1995, arising out of clinical trials of a drug, deferiprone which she initiated in 1989 in children with an inherited blood disorder, Dr. Olivieri has been involved in a struggle involving the protection of patients and the influence of the pharmaceutical industry in research. She became the target of the CEO of the drug company Apotex (Barry Sherman, who later met a mysterious violent death) and of Hospital and University administrators who, anticipating a large donation from Sherman, took actions against her including an unsuccessful attempt to revoke her medical license. After 18 years, all legal proceedings were settled while, in parallel, Dr. Olivieri was exonerated of false charges of misconduct. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada ruled her advocacy for vulnerable patients “commendable”.
Over the last five years Dr. Olivieri had continued to seek accountability for the unlicensed use of deferiprone in Toronto patients in whom harms and deaths occurred, raising issues of institutional conflicts of interest, patient safety and research integrity at Canada’s largest research institute.
Dr. Olivieri continues her work in blood diseases in Asia through Hemoglobal® a charity she founded with Sir David Weatherall. In 2003, she obtained a Masters in Medical Law and Ethics from Kings’ College, London, UK and created a course Health and Pharmaceuticals to inform students about the influences of the pharmaceutical industry in research. Dr. Olivieri is completing a book about this long conflict, and a mini-series on the saga is now in pre-production.
Prof. Alison Avenell
University of Aberdeen, UK
Alison Avenell is an Honorary Consultant in Clinical Biochemistry, NHS Grampian in Scotland, where her clinical work has focussed on the care of patients with diabetes and obesity, helping run the hospital nutrition team for adults, and providing NHS laboratory services.
Her research at the University of Aberdeen involves undertaking large randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews relevant to clinical care. In her evidence synthesis work for the Cochrane library she found integrity issues in trials from Japan, and thus became a research sleuth.
With colleagues, Mark Bolland and Andrew Grey from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who are also research sleuths, the team has developed statistical methods and a checklist to help assess publication integrity. As a result of their experiences with this and other large cases in research integrity, the team has written on research integrity issues relating to universities, publishers and the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Prof. Li Tang
Fudan University, Shanghai
Li Tang is a Professor of Public Policy at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.
Her research focuses on research integrity, science and innovation policy, and program evaluation. As a principal investigator, Dr. Tang has led several research projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Social Science Fund of China, and the Ministry of Education of China. Her work has been published in leading journals, including Science and Nature.
Prof. Raphaël Lévy
Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, France
Raphaël Lévy is a professor of physics at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord since 2020. He is the coordinating PI of the ERC Synergy grant NanoBubbles (2021-2026, How, when and why does science fails to correct itself?).
He defended his PhD in Strasbourg in 2002 and then moved to Liverpool where he established his research group focusing on the development and applications of nanoparticles in biology. He encountered errors and frauds in this field of research and, starting around 2008, made various attempts at corrections, from the traditional letter to the editors, to reporting cases to scientific institutions, and to the use of PubPeer and other social media to document and share those cases and their (mis)-handling.
In 2021, shortly after coming back to France, he had to report a major case in the laboratory that he had just joined and was the target of various retaliation efforts. Within the NanoBubbles’ project, he leads a post-publication initiative and a replication effort in the field of bionanosciences. He is particularly interested (and has direct experience, not always pleasant) by the response of fellow scientists, publishers and scientific institutions to efforts to correct scientific errors and frauds.
Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky, FAcSS
University of Bristol
Prof Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist interested in the pressure points between the architecture of online information technologies and human cognition, and the consequences for democracy that arise from those pressure points.
This led him to examine the persistence of misinformation and spread of “fake news” in society, including conspiracy theories, and how platform algorithms may contribute to the prevalence of misinformation. He is also interested in the variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science. Because his research speaks to important contemporary issues, he works with policy makers, mainly at the European level, to make democracy more resilient to toxicity online.
He also contributes to public debate through opinion pieces in the media and public engagements. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours (more information available here). In 2022, 2023 and 2024 he was identified as a highly cited researcher by Clarivate. He was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) in 2022.
Dr Ivan Oransky, MD
Retraction Watch; New York University; The Simons Foundation
Ivan Oransky, MD, is co-founder of Retraction Watch, editor in chief of The Transmitter, and distinguished journalist in residence at New York University's Arthur Carter Journalism Institute.
Ivan was previously president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and vice president of editorial at Medscape. He has also held editorial leadership positions at MedPage Today, Reuters Health, Scientific American and The Scientist. 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). In 2019, the judges for the John Maddox Prize, which promotes those who stand up for science in the face of hostility, awarded him a commendation for his work at Retraction Watch.
Eugenie Reich
Eugenie Reich Law, LLC
Eugenie Reich is a whistleblower lawyer representing scientists, medical and other technical experts encountering fraud by research-based organisations, including universities, healthcare providers, and corporations.
She was a core member of a team that achieved a record $900 million settlement in a case against a pharmaceutical company. She also contributed to the United States government reaching a $10 million settlement in a case involving fabricated data in research articles and grants. She relies on U.S. whistleblower compensation programs to offer contingent fee representation, in which defendants must cover whistleblowers' legal fees if and when the government recovers money.
Eugenie also assists scientists who are participating in government investigations or navigating how to make their concerns public. Prior to law school at Boston University School of Law, she was a science journalist for many years, and published a 2009 book on scientific fraud, “Plastic Fantastic: How The Biggest Fraud In Physics Shook the Scientific World.” She holds a B.A. in Physics and Philosophy from Balliol College, Oxford.
Prof. Patricia Kingori
University of Oxford
Patricia Kingori is a sociologist and Professor of Global Health Ethics at the Ethox Centre, University of Oxford. She is also the Lead Investigator of the Wellcome-funded "Fakes, fabrications and falsehoods" project.
Patricia’s work sits at the intersection of sociology, ethics, and science and technology studies. Over the last twenty years, much of her work has been concerned with understanding, exploring and documenting different forms of power in global health. Some of the work has concerned understanding how and clinical trial fieldworkers in the global south fabricate data. This work also explores predatory and fake journals, the complexity involved in detecting of fake medicines and the multi-billion dollar ‘fake essay’ industry.
Patricia has acted as an advisor on the ethical conduct of research and intervention in the UK and in a range of African and South-east Asian countries on the ethical treatment of frontline staff to numerous organisations including the WHO, Save the Children, the Medical Research Council, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders and the Nuffield Council of Bioethics. Her work has helped promote the inclusion of a wider range of actors in discussions of global health and bioethics in practice and has directly shaped the attention given to the safety and experiences of frontline workers.
Patricia has acted as the Keynote Speaker at multiple conferences, and as a panel member for funding bodies including the Wellcome Trust. She is widely published and has acted as a guest editor for numerous special issues for journals including the Sociology of Health & Illness, Social Science & Medicine, Global Public Health, Journal of African Cultural Studies and Science & Technology Studies.
Prof. Rachael Gooberman-Hill
Co-chair, UK Committee on Research Integrity (CORI)
Professor Rachael Gooberman-Hill is attending as Co-chair of the UK Committee on Research Integrity.
The Committee was established in 2022 to work across research environments and disciplines to promote and strengthen research integrity in the UK. The Committee produces an annual statement and delivers focused project work to inform recommendations for the UK research sector. Since 2024, the Committee has provided the secretariat for the UK Concordat to Support Research Integrity. Rachael also holds a substantive position as Professor of Health and Anthropology and recently completed a seven-year term as Director of the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for Health Research, both at the University of Bristol. With a background in social anthropology, she has spent most of her career working in and leading interdisciplinary research on a range of topics, recently including trust in science. Rachael has served on a number of research advisory groups, steering groups, funding panels, and as a trustee and committee member of scholarly associations.
Till Bruckner
TranspariMED; Karolinska Institutet; UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Till Bruckner is a political scientist and the founder of TranspariMED, a campaign that works to end evidence distortion in medicine. He currently works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, and as communications and policy manager at a climate research centre in Norway.
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Till previously campaigned for more transparency in think tank funding via Transparify and conducted an investigation into foreign lobbying operations by Azerbaijan. Former employers include the QUEST Center for Responsible Research, the anti-corruption group Transparency International, and international development organisations.
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Till is interested in the nitty-gritty mechanisms of lobbying, influence, evidence distortion, and censorship across science, politics and the media. He has lived in various beacons of freedom, democracy and integrity, including Afghanistan, Georgia, and Mauritania.
Prof. Uri Simonsohn
Esade Business School, Barcelona
Uri is a behavioural scientist working at the intersection of psychology and economics.
He has co-authored various papers on increasing transparency in social science ("False-Positive Psychology", "p-curve: a key to the file-drawer" and "Specification Curve Analysis" among them). He is co-author of the blog DataColada; co-director of the Wharton Credibility Lab; the creator and maintainer of the platforms AsPredicted.org and ResearchBox; and creator and maintainer of the R package 'groundhog' for version control in R.
He has been involved in identifying around 10 separate cases of fraud in behavioral science, including those involving data used in published papers by Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely. He is also developing a site to prevent fraud through data provenance documentation: "AsCollected".
Dr Anna Abalkina
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Dr. Anna Abalkina is a research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany). She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Perugia (Italy) with a background in international economics. However, she later shifted her research focus to corruption in higher education, academic misconduct, plagiarism, paper mills, and predatory and hijacked journals. Her research not only involves detecting and analyzing scientific misconduct but also explaining its costs and consequences.
Since 2013, Anna has been actively serving as an expert for Dissernet, a grassroots initiative aimed at detecting plagiarism in Ph.D. theses and scientific papers in the Russian language. Since 2021, she has successfully detected and investigated several paper mills, identifying more than 1000 papers with potential authorship fraud and/or violations of peer review. In 2022, Anna, in collaboration with Retraction Watch created “The Retraction Watch Hijacked Journal Checker,” a regularly updated list of hijacked journals.
She was recently named one of Nature’s 10, a list of people who shaped science in 2024.
Prof. Elizabeth Perkins
University of Liverpool
Liz has worked in the field of health and social policy research for the last thirty years. Following her PhD at the University of Manchester she worked at Policy Studies Institute, London, where she was involved in designing and managing a large-scale survey of individuals and families funded by the ESRC. She moved to the University of Liverpool in 2007 when she became director of the Health and Community Care Research Unit. She was appointed as the William Rathbone VI Chair of Community Nursing Research in 2004.
Latterly, she has focused on undertaking qualitative studies using non-participant observation, in-depth interviews and documentary analysis. Professor Perkins works mainly in interdisciplinary research teams. Decision-making, either by professionals or patients, is a theme which runs through much of her research. She is currently undertaking research in the field of mental health, particularly focusing on forensic and community services. She is also a member of the People and Animals and their Health (PATHS) group.
Liz has been involved in research ethics and integrity in various ways throughout her research career. She was a member of the North West Multi-Centre Research Ethics committee for the NHS, she chaired the University of Liverpool’s Research Ethics Committee and in 2018 was appointed the Named Person for Research Integrity at the University of Liverpool. In this role Liz undertakes the initial assessment of potential cases of research misconduct for the University of Liverpool.
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Prof. Guillaume Cabanac
Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
Guillaume Cabanac is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier and holds a research chair at the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF).
He is a member of the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT UMR 5505 CNRS) and serves in the CNRS National Committee as an appointed member of the Scientific Board of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (InSHS). His interdisciplinary research contributes to the analysis of the scientific literature, particularly through the ERC Synergy NanoBubbles project which explores the process of self-correction of science.
He develops the Problematic Paper Screener, which screens unreliable publications that are nevertheless published, and often sold, by leading publishers. His research was distinguished in the Nature's 10 list of ten people who helped shape science in 2021
Dr John Carlisle
Consultant anaesthetist, Torbay Hospital
John Carlisle is a consultant anaesthetist at Torbay Hospital in Devon and a critic of dubious data in medical trials. Convinced that his specialty was being polluted by false claims from the Japanese researcher Yoshitaka Fujii, Carlisle responded to a challenge to prove this, developing a statistical method that can measure how likely it is that the baseline data in a randomised trial are true. Fujii failed the test and has since had more than 160 papers retracted, probably making him the world record holder.
Four years later, Carlisle co-published an analysis of results from another Japanese anaesthesiologist, Yuhji Saitoh – a frequent co-author of Fujii’s – and demonstrated that his data were extremely suspicious, too.
In 2017, he published an analysis in the journal Anaesthesia stating that he had found suspect data in 90 of more than 5,000 trials published over 16 years. At least ten of these papers have since been retracted and six corrected, including a high-profile study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on the health benefits of the Mediterranean diet, albeit for sloppy randomisation, not dishonesty. Trialists everywhere have been forced to raise their game.
Prof. Csaba Szabo
University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Csaba Szabo is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of oxidative and nitrosative stress, gaseous transmitters, cell death, cell dysfunction, cardiovascular disease and inflammatory mechanisms. He currently leads a multidisciplinary team at the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He has received numerous awards, including the Novartis Award of the British Pharmacological Society, the Dennis Gabor Innovation Award, the Texas Star Award and the Pharmacia-ASPET Award for Experimental Therapeutics. Csaba Szabo has published over 500 original research articles and, with an h-index of 153 and over 90,000 citations, has been listed as one of the ten most cited pharmacologists in the world for the last decade.
His upcoming book, ‘Unreliable’, examines the causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis in biomedical research, showing why the factors that encourage misconduct stem from flaws in real-world science.