Daniel Lakens

Daniel Lakens is an experimental psychologist working at the Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. In addition to his empirical work in cognitive and social psychology, he works actively on improving research methods and statistical inferences and has published on the importance of replication research, sequential analyses and equivalence testing, and frequentist statistics. He was involved in establishing dedicated grants for replication studies by the Dutch science funder NWO, and with Brian Nosek co-edited a special issue with the first Registered Reports in psychology in 2014. His lab is funded until 2022 by a VIDI grant on a project that aims to improve the reliability and efficiency of psychological science. He teaches about better research practices on Coursera and received the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science in 2017 for his course ‘Improving Your Statistical Inferences’ in which more than 50.000 learners have enrolled. 

About Dorothy:

"Dorothy embodies what it means to be a scientist in many ways. Her enthusiasm to learn programming in R and improve her understanding of statistics through simulations at a time when most Professors would delegate such tasks to junior researchers is contagious. She acknowledges fallibility in science, and her recommendations to evaluate researchers not by whether they make errors, but how they deal with errors, is inspirational. The way she embraces a critical attitude is nicely exemplified in Bishop’s Law (https://twitter.com/deevybee/status/1141236721486618630?s=20, which I teach in my own education) that “the better-designed a study is, the more likely it is to obtain a null result”. And yet she manages to voice her criticism, which often comes from a frustration with how science is done, and a desire to work on improving it, not by alienating fellow researchers, but by inspiring them, being a role model for how to be a good scientist."