About me

Fiona Fidler

fidlerfm at unimelb.edu.au

Associate Professor | ARC Future Fellow

School of BioSciences | School of Historical and Philosophical Studies

I’m interested in how scientists and other experts reason, make and justify decisions and change their minds.

My research group is the Interdisciplinary Meta-Research Group (IMeRG).

Current research interests:  Reproducibility, transparency and open science; expert judgement, reasoning and decision making; methodology change in science; behavioural and institutional change; research ethics and scientific integrity.

In the School of BioSciences, I am part of the Quantitative and Applied Ecology group (Qaeco). In the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, I am part of the History and Philosophy of Science program (HPS). I have ongoing collaborations with the wonderful Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group at RMIT University and am a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Environmental Decisions (CEED).

Reproducibility, Open Science, Scientific Methodology. 

I’m investigating the “reproducibility crisis” in science, including publication bias, questionable research practices (like p-hacking, cherry picking, HARKing), and initiatives for improving inference. I’m particularly interested in methods for evaluating the evidence base of sciences like ecology, where large scale replication projects are usually not feasible. This work is supported by an ARC Future Fellowship.

I also have an abiding interest is statistical controversies, for example, the ongoing debate over Null Hypothesis Significance Testing versus Estimation (Effect Sizes, Confidence Intervals) and arguments about Frequentists versus Bayesian statistics.

Expert Judgement.

I was a Chief Investigator (with Mark Burgman, Tim Van Gelder and Richard di Rosario) on the University of Melbourne’s CREATE (Crowdsourced Reasoning, Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation) project, project funded by IARPA (research agency of the US Office of National Intelligence). This project built structured tools to support better reasoning and analysis in an online crowdsourced environment. I left the project at the end of Phase 1 to pursue a new project (to be announced soon).

I have worked on various other expert judgement projects in ACERA (Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Assessment) and later CEBRA (Centre of Excellence for BioSecurity Risk Assessment).

Background: My undergraduate (honours) degree was in Psychology, with a second major in Sociology. I completed my PhD in the (then) Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne in 2006 (thesis title: From Statistical Significance to Effect Estimation: Statistical Reform in Psychology, Medicine and Ecology).

I was an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Psychological Science at La Trobe University (2007-2010) and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Assessment (CEBRA) and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Environmental Decisions (CEED) at The University of Melbourne (2011-2014). I joined the Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group in the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT for 2015.

In 2016 I returned to the University of Melbourne as an Associate Professor. I have a joint appointment School of BioSciences and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies.

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