Robert Nadon began his career as an experimental psychologist and transitioned to statistical analysis of high-throughput biology in the 1990ties. He is Professor at the Department of Human Genetics, McGill University and PI at the McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Centre. His primary research interests during the last 10 years have been the development of data analysis approaches for high-throughput data for biotechnology applications (HTS of small molecule and RNAi data, Genome-wide mRNA translation, Image-based high content screening, Microarray gene expression). Like many of us, he has recently become concerned with deficiencies in biomedical research practice which seem to produce an excess of false findings. In 2018 he is planning to spend a sabbatical in Berlin and pursue a project regarding why perceptions about the quality of biomedical research can differ so radically among scientists and across disciplines and what this may mean for the future of biomedical research.
In his talk he will focus on incentives and rewards in the academic system, as potential root cause of the current issues regarding the reliability and robustness of biomedical results as well as a potential key to overcoming them.