Tell us about your work

I am a professor at the Psychological Methods Group and I try to help researchers draw sensible conclusions from noisy data. This means that I develop new statistical methodology, and that I then make that methodology widely accessible through tutorial papers and open-source software; this is the only way in which the methodology can have a positive impact on real data-analysis problems. Theoretical satisfaction and practical usefulness are the heads and tails of a productive statistical paradigm – you can’t have one without the other.

I advocate radical transparency in research, I develop and promote Bayesian methods of inference (“common sense expressed in numbers”), and I coordinate the development of JASP, an open-source software package for statistical analysis that is used all over the world (jaspstats.org). Also, when I was a child I wanted to become an archeologist. This phase did not last long, but 40 years later I find myself digging through old academic books in search of hidden treasures.

What is your motivation?

The scientific method is both elegant and straightforward. Unfortunately it is constantly under threat from confirmation bias, hindsight bias, incoherence, inertia and commercial exploitation. My goal is to make students and researchers aware of these threats and provide them with the tools to mount an effective resistance. Over the years I have increasingly come to appreciate the elegance of simplicity, the need to avoid contradictions, and the intellectual hygiene that typifies the scientific method and its coherent application. 

Your vision

My public goal is to make it feasible, attractive and normative for researchers to draw conclusions from their data in a way that is both transparent and coherent. My personal goal is to continue to learn, to teach, to collaborate with my colleagues, and to mentor the next generation of researchers. I feel tremendously privileged to be a university professor at UvA and be paid a salary to contemplate topics of my own choosing, for however long I desire.