NSF Workshop
Systematic Approach to Robustness,
Reliability, and Reproducibility
in Scientific Research
February 25 – 26, 2017
Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences & Engineering
University of California at Irvine
100 Academy Way
Irvine, CA 92617
(949) 721-2200
The federal investment in scientific and engineering research drives innovation across our society; it also provides a foundation for national competitiveness, prosperity, and sound public policy. Recently, several prominent studies have highlighted a significant proportion of research reports, in certain fields, that are not reproducible. There is growing concern within the scientific enterprise and a loss of public trust in the reliability of science, especially the results of basic research funded by the taxpayer, is a serious issue.
The Administration, through OMB and OSTP, has directed that funding agencies, including the NSF, address these problems of irreproducibility, which includes cases where the data generated by publicly-funded research is not accessible. As part of its response to this mandate, the NSF is supporting the scientific community in efforts to find the root causes of these problems, and through extensive discussions identify ways in which they can best be solved.
This workshop is an initial step that brings together representatives of a wide-ranging segment of the scientific community to consider the problems, identify commonalities that may exist across disciplines, and envisage how progress towards solutions can engage the broader scientific community.
The outcome of this workshop will be a report that will be publicly available by early 2017.
Principal Investigator
David A. Weitz (Harvard University)
Workshop Leaders
Andrea Liu (University of Pennsylvania)
Wallace Marshall (UC San Francisco)
Roger D. Peng (Johns Hopkins University)
Victoria Stodden (University of Illinois)
Workshop Participants
Keith Baggerly (UTexas/MD Anderson)
Paul Chaikin (New York University)
George Fuller (UC San Diego)
Carol Hall (North Carolina State University)
Robert Hanisch (ODI, NIST)
Leslie Hatton (University of Kingston)
Amy E. Herr (UC Berkeley)
Mike Hildreth (Notre Dame)
Daniel S. Katz (University of Illinois)
Gareth H. McKinley (MIT)
Peter J. Mohr (NIST)
Jose Onuchic (Rice University)
Manish Pararashar (Rutgers University)
Steven Vigdor (Indiana University)
George Whitesides (Harvard University)
William Allen Zajc (Columbia University)
Agency Contacts
Bogdan Mihaila (NSF, Mathematical
and Physical Sciences)
Gregory W. Warr (NSF, Molecular
and Cellular Biosciences)