Kate Laskowski: What to Do When You Don’t Trust Your Data Anymore

Plenary given at the 2024 Conference of the Society for Open, Reliable, and Transparent Ecology and Evolutionary Biology www.sortee.org...
What to Do When You Don’t Trust Your Data Anymore
15 October 2024, 1800 UTC
Abstract: Science is built on trust. Trust that our experiments will work. Trust that our collaborators will pull their weight on our projects. And most importantly, trust that the data we so painstakingly collect are accurate and as representative of the real world that they can be. And so when I realized that I could no longer trust the data that I had reported in some of my papers, I did what I think was the only correct course of action. I retracted them. In this talk, I retell how and why I came to the decision to retract some of my favorite papers and highlight some of the lessons I learned. I focus on steps that both individual researchers and our community at large can take to improve trust in the integrity of our work.
Bio: Dr. Kate Laskowski investigates how evolution has shaped the developmental processes that generate behavioral individuality by studying replicate individuals and groups of the naturally clonal fish, the Amazon molly. This allows her to “replay the developmental clock.” Using high-resolution tracking technologies, Kate can follow the development of these animals in unprecedented detail. She employs integrative methods, coupling behavioral observations with gene expression data and patterns of neural activation to better understand how individuals integrate information throughout their lives. Kate obtained her PhD in 2013 at the University of Illinois, where she worked under Alison Bell. She then moved to Germany to work at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology & Inland Fisheries with Max Wolf and Jens Krause in Berlin, before joining the Department of Evolution & Ecology at the University of California, Davis, in 2019. Kate has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the German Science Foundation. She was named the Animal Behavior Society’s Outstanding New Investigator in 2022 and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow in Neuroscience in 2023.