SPORR presents inaugural Rigor and Reproducibility awards

Stanford University’s School of Medicine Program on Research Rigor & Reproducibility (SPORR), presented awards to six Stanford investigators at its first school-wide Colloquium and Help-a-thon, held on January 23rd, 2023 at Berg Hall.

SPORR presented four cash awards and two honorable mentions to investigators and research groups from six departments whose research practices were premier exemplars or facilitators of best practices in research rigor and reproducibility. The submissions reflected the enormous amount of creativity and leadership Stanford researchers are exhibiting in their research practices. One of SPORR’s goals is to bring such models to the attention of Stanford researchers and widen their local implementation and impact.

2023 SPORR Award Winners

Tom Robinson, Professor of Pediatrics and Medicine, on behalf of the GOALS project team, for a rigorous and reproducible design of a large scale, community-based child and family obesity intervention trial.

Jade Benjamin-Chung, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, for creation of an online open source lab manual that can be adopted for use by other researchers and that describes, among other topics, authorship guidelines, creation of reproducible workflows, and data management practices.  

Arjun Desai, doctoral student in Electrical Engineering, for creating a massive library of curated machine-readable medical images, tutorials, and reproducible research workflows used to train AI in medical imaging.

Emma Lundberg, Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Pathology, on behalf of her lab group, for a decade-long effort to build the Cell Atlas of the Human Protein Atlas database and for promoting bioimaging analysis using open and reproducible methods and citizen science. The lab was represented at the Colloquium by Anna Martinez Casals.

Honorable mentions

Joseph Garner, Professor of Comparative Medicine, for decades long work on improving rigor and reproducibility of animal and translational research.  

Xiaotao Shen, post-doctoral scholar in Genetics, for creation of computational framework that can achieve traceable, shareable, and reproducible workflows in the field of metabolomics.

More details on the recognized work are provided on the SPORR website.

The SPORR Colloquium was organized in collaboration with Stanford’s Quantitative Sciences Unit, and featured an introduction by Dean Lloyd Minor, a plenary talk from Dr. Harvey Fineberg (President, Moore Foundation, former president of the National Academy of Medicine), and a talk from John Borghi (new director of SPORR’s data management services) on the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy. It also featured a talk from SPORR Director Steven Goodman, Associate Dean and Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine, on SPORR activities, and a roundtable of faculty and students moderated by Senior Associate Dean of Research Dr. Ruth O’Hara on ways to improve School of Medicine’s approach to rigor and reproducibility. The event recording can be seen here.

A variety of ongoing initiatives to support and involve both School of Medicine students and faculty were described, including a Stanford chapter of ReproducibiliTea, an international network of forums for graduate students to discuss R&R issues, ongoing focus groups on data sharing and management practices, and an opportunity for graduate students to become R&R Ambassadors in their labs/divisions.

For more SPORR activities, see the website or contact SPORR Associate Director Mario Malički, MD, MA, PhD at stanfordsporr@stanford.edu.

About SPORR

SPORR is an initiative started in 2020 to train and assist SoM investigators in optimizing the rigor and reproducibility (“R&R”) of their research. It is directed by Associate Dean and Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine Steven Goodman, MD, PhD. SPORR is part of Spectrum, Stanford’s Center for Clinical and Translational Research and Education, directed by Dr. Ruth O’Hara, Senior Associate Dean of Research.