Victoria Stodden

A Short Biography

VICTORIA STODDEN is Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California.

She received a Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University and a Law Degree from Stanford Law School. She graduated magna cum laude with her Bachelor’s in Economics from the University of Ottawa and holds a master’s degree in Economics from the University of British Columbia. She held the Kauffman Innovation fellowship at Yale Law School and was a Berkman Klein fellow at Harvard Law School. She was a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and has held faculty positions at the University of California Berkeley, Columbia University, and a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Stodden is an internationally recognized leader in improving the reliability of scientific results in the face of increasingly sophisticated computational approaches to research: understanding when and how inferences from data are valid and reproducible, what it means to have replicated a result, the effect of big data and computation on scientific inference, the design and implementation of scientific validation systems, standards of openness and transparency for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research.

She has published more than 50 papers in scientific journals and conference proceedings, and has co-edited two professional books, published in 2014, Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement, published by Cambridge University Press and Implementing Reproducible Research, published by Taylor & Francis.

In 2009 she won the Access to Knowledge Kaltura prize for her publication on legal issues in reproducible research and scientific innovation. She has served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committees: “Reproducibility and Replication in Science” and “Fostering Research Integrity.” She co-chaired the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure and was a member of the National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee. She has been quoted in The Economist (2013) and interviewed by publications such as Nature (2016) on reproducibility in science.

She also testified on scientific reproducibility before the Congressional House Committee on Science, Space and Technology for the March 5, 2013 hearing on Scientific Integrity & Transparency.

She is PI on NSF awards #1941443 EAGER: Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science, and #1839010: EAGER: Preserve/Destroy Decisions for Simulation Data in Computational Physics and Beyond; and she is co-PI on the NSF grant #1541450: CC*DNI DIBBS: Merging Science and Cyberinfrastructure Pathways: The Whole Tale.

Her ORCID ID is 0000-0003-2015-7825.

Photo

External Appointments

Research

My research takes a systems approach to understanding how and when inferences from data are valid and reproducible. My group focuses on understanding the effect of big data and computation on scientific inference, for example studying adequacy and robustness in replicated results, designing and implementing validation systems, developing standards of openness for data and code sharing, and resolving legal and policy barriers to disseminating reproducible research.

I created the "Reproducible Research Standard," a suite of open licensing recommendations for the dissemination of computational results, and winner of the Kaltura Prize for Access to Knowledge.

I was co-PI on NSF award:

• #1541450: CC*DNI DIBBS: Merging Science and Cyberinfrastructure Pathways: The Whole Tale.

I have served as PI on several NSF awards:

• #2028881 PPoSS: Planning: Performance Scalability, Trust, and Reproducibility: A Community Roadmap to Robust Science in $
• #1941443 EAGER: Reproducibility and Cyberinfrastructure for Computational and Data-Enabled Science,
• #1839010 EAGER: Preserve/Destroy Decisions for Simulation Data in Computational Physics and Beyond,
• #1649555: EAGER: Collaborative Research: Supporting Public Access to Supplemental Scholarly Products Generated from Grant Funded Research,
• EAGER: Policy Design for Reproducibility and Data Sharing in Computational Science.

and I was PI on the Sloan Foundation grant Facilitating Transparency in Scientific Publishing.

Software Projects

I founded the open source project ResearchCompendia.org, designed to study the verification of code and data associated with published results, enable independent and public cloud-based validation of methods and findings. I am a co-founder of RunMyCode.org, a platform connecting data and code to published articles.

As part of my PhD dissertation, I created SparseLab, a collaborative platform for reproducible computational research in underdetermined systems.

Service, Boards, and Conflicts of Interest

The service aspects of my job are among those I enjoy the most. I endeavor to minimize any potential influence this service could have on other areas where I am active, however I'm disclosing my relationships to let people know of any possible influences.

• I was a member of the TOP Guidelines Coordinating Committee.
• I serve on the Joint Advisory Group for the National Academy of Engineering Online Resource Center for Ethics Education in Engineering and Science.
• I was a member of the International Mathematical Union (IMU) Committee on Electronic Information and Communication (CEIC).
• I serve on the Project TIER (Teaching Integrity in Empirical Research) Advisory Board.
• I serve as an Advisor to the Curating for Reproducibility (CURE) Consortium.
• I served on the ACM Task Force on Data, Software, and Reproducibility in Publication.
• I am a Founding Member of the Author's Alliance, an organization dedicated to advancing the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly.

Editorial Service

• Associate Editor for the Harvard Data Science Review.
• Former Advisory Board Member, Statistical Analysis and Data Mining: The ASA Data Science Journal.
• Advisory Board Member, Research Ideas and Outcomes, the Open Science Journal.
• I previously served as an inaugural Associate Editor for Reproducibility, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Applications and Case Studies, and associate editor for Annals of Applied Statistics.

My Institution

My employer is the University of Southern California.

Previous Service

• In 2020 I served on the IEEE Computer Society Ad Hoc Committee on Open Science and Reproducibility.
• I have served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Reproducibility and Replicability in Science.
• I served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Roundtable on Data Science Post-Secondary Education.
• I co-chaired the National Science Foundation's Advisory Committee for CyberInfrastructure.
• I served on the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Advisory Committee.
• I served on the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on "Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process."
• I have previously served on the ACM Ethics & Plagiarism Committee, the Advisory Group on Reproducibility to the SC Conference, ACM, and IEEE, the AGU Data Science Credentialing Board, and the Coalition for Academic Scientific Computation (CASC) External Advisory Board, the American Statistical Association Committee on Professional Ethics, the advisory committee for the National Forum on Data Mining Research Using In-copyright and Limited-access Text Datasets, the advisory group for the SPARC Research Data Sharing Policy Initiative, and
• the National Academy of Sciences Roundtable on Data Science Post-Secondary Education.
• I testified before the Congressional House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on Scientific Transparency and Integrity on March 5, 2013.
• I co-chaired a working group on Virtual Organizations for the NSF's Office of Cyberinfrastructure Task Force on Grand Challenge Communities in 2010.
• I served on the NSF Mathematics and Physical Sciences Directorate Subcommittee on "Support for the Statistical Sciences at NSF."
• I served on the National Institutes for Health's PubMed Central National Advisory Committee.
• I served on Advisory Boards for hackNY.org, The Galaxy Project, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC).
• I served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Open Science.
• I served on several committees in the American Statistical Association: The Committee on Privacy and Confidentiality, the Committee on Data Sharing and Reproducibility, and the Presidential Strategic Initiative, Developing a Prototype Statistics Portal.
• I have served on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Senate IT Committee.
• I served on the Digital Culture Advisory Board at the nonprofit Social Science Research Council (SSRC).
• I served on the American Geophysical Union Data Science Credentialing Editorial Board.

Fun Facts

My Erdös Number is 3.

I was a varsity crew member for the first two years of my undergraduate degree, then competed at the Club level for the next two years with the Ottawa Rowing Club. I'd race in any boat but my speciality was the lightweight eight, port or starboard.