Steering Group
The AUS-RN Steering Group currently comprises Fiona Fidler, Tammy Hoffmann, Ginny Barbour, Shinichi Nakagawa, Alex Holcombe, Matthew Page, Jen Beaudry, Louise Townsin and Ben Mol.
Professor Fiona Fidler
University of Melbourne
Fiona is broadly interested in how experts, including scientists, make decisions and change their minds. Her past research has examined how methodological change occurs in different disciplines, including psychology, medicine and ecology, and developed methods for eliciting reliable expert judgements to improve decision making.
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She originally trained as a psychologist, and maintains a strong interest in psychological methods. She also has an abiding interest is statistical controversies, for example, the ongoing debate over Null Hypothesis Significance Testing. She is a current Australian Research Council Future Fellow, and leads the University of Melbourne’s Interdisciplinary MetaResearch Group (imerg.info). Her position at the University of Melbourne is split across the School of BioSciences (Ecology & Evolution) and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies (History & Philosophy of Science).
Professor Tammy Hoffmann OAM
Bond University
Tammy is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and NHMRC Investigator (Leadership) Fellow at the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare, Bond University. She is also Director of the Australasian EQUATOR centre - one of the six global centres of the international EQUATOR Network dedicated to enhancing the quality and transparency of health research. Her research currently broadly centres around the areas of: engaging patients in shared decision making with clinicians about their healthcare; improving the quality of research evidence for health interventions (such as through the transparent and accurate reporting of randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews); and making evidence-based practice and evidence implementation easier for clinicians. She is the lead author of the TIDieR (Template for Intervention Description and Replication) Guide and Checklist to improve intervention reporting, and part of the teams that developed PRISMA 2020, CONSORT 2025, and SPIRIT 2025.
ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5210-8548
Professor Shinichi Nakagawa
UNSW
Shinichi is originally from Japan but has studied and worked in New Zealand, UK, Germany and Australia. He is currently a professor of behavioural/evolutionary ecology and research synthesis at UNSW, Sydney (www.i-deel.org). He has been always interested in better statistical methods and reporting, having written several best practice guides for the fields of ecology and evolution. He has so far been involved in conducting over 50 meta-analyses and have been recently co-developing PRISMA for EcoEvo (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses for Ecology and Evolution) with his collaborators. Shinichi has also co-established a preprint server for ecology, evolution and conservation biology, EcoEvoRxiv (www.ecoevorxiv.org).
Professor Ginny Barbour
QUT
Ginny Barbour is Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group and is Co-Lead, Office for Scholarly Communication, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). In 2004, she was one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine. She has been involved over the years with many Open Access, publishing, and ethics initiatives including currently (DORA) the Cochrane Library Oversight Committee, and as a Plan S Ambassador. She writes for the Conversation She is on the NHMRC’s Research Quality Steering Committee.
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Her ORCID profile is here:
Professor Alex Holcombe
University of Sydney
Professor Alex Holcombe is an experimental psychologist at the University of Sydney. He has worked on various initiatives to address publication bias and reproducibility. For example, he co-founded the Registered Replication Reports since 2013, co-founding the journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science in 2018, and this year joining the editorial board of Collabra: Psychology. You can find him discussing open science and related issues on twitter (@ceptional).
Dr Matthew Page
Monash University
Dr. Matthew Page is a Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Head of the Methods in Evidence Synthesis Unit in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University in Australia. His research aims to improve the credibility of health and medical research. He co-led the development of the PRISMA 2020 statement for systematic reviews and was a member of the core group who developed the RoB 2 tool for assessing risk of bias in randomized trials. He is an associate scientific editor for the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. He frequently collaborates with clinicians on systematic reviews of interventions for a range of conditions, which often informs his meta-research agenda.
Dr Jen Beaudry
Flinders University
Jen is the Manager of Researcher Training, Development and Communication at Flinders University. With a PhD in Social Psychology, Jen spent nearly 15 years as an academic in Canada, the USA, and Australia. A vocal advocate for open science, Jen was on the founding executive of the Association for Interdisciplinary Meta-Research and Open Science (AIMOS) and was the Academic Lead for the Open Science Task Force at Swinburne University of Technology. She brings her passion for fostering positive research cultures and improving research practices into her role as a research professional.
Dr Louise Townsin
Torrens University
Dr Louise Townsin is responsible for leading Research Management Services at Torrens University Australia, providing strategic and operational support for research and research training activities. Her work involves the development and implementation of policies, procedures and initiatives designed to promote quality research. She also undertakes research in cultural contexts of health and wellbeing, using mostly qualitative methods to explore sustainable attitudinal and behavioural change.
Professor Ben Mol
Monash University
Ben (Willem) Mol is Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Monash University. During his time in Australia, Ben has worked on clinical trial capacity in women’s health at Monash. He developed extensive relations with Asian universities, resulting in large randomised clinical trials. Ben is also involved in many Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis, in which on many topics in Obstetrics and in Reproductive Medicine data of randomised clinical trials performed worldwide are brought together. Recently, Ben has worked also on systems to detect data-fabrication in RCTs. He has published >1600 papers and supervised 130 PhD students.
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His professional adage is ‘A day without randomisation is a day without progress.'