Featured Keynote Speakers

Title: Pre-registration, Reporting Guidelines, and Publication Patterns in Economics

Abstract: TBC

Biography: Edward Miguel is Distinguished Professor of Economics, the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, & Faculty co-Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 2000.

He earned S.B. degrees in both Economics and Mathematics from MIT, received a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, where he was a National Science Foundation Fellow, and has been a visiting professor at Princeton University and Stanford University.

Ted’s main research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India. He has published over 120 articles and chapters in leading academic journals and collected volumes, and his work has been cited over 50,000 times according to Google Scholar.

Miguel is a Faculty Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, has served as Associate Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science, was awarded the 2024 Frisch Medal by the Econometric Society (presented biennially for the best applied paper published in Econometrica in the previous four years), is a recipient of the 2005 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, winner of the 2005 Kenneth J. Arrow Prize awarded annually by the International Health Economics Association for the Best Paper in Health Economics, and a 2002 Berkeley Hellman Fellow. Prof. Miguel was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

He is a recipient of the 2015 U.C. Berkeley Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award, the 2012 Berkeley campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, the Best Graduate Adviser Award in the Berkeley Economics Department, and has served on over 150 completed doctoral dissertation committees.

Ted co-founded the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) in 2007 and serves as Faculty Co-Director. He co-founded the Working Group in African Political Economy (WGAPE) (with Dan Posner of UCLA) in 2002, and co-founded the Pacific Development Conference (PacDev) in 2005. Ted is also the co-founder and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS), which was awarded the 2023 Einstein Foundation Institutional Award for Promoting Quality in Research. He was a founding co-Director of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab (O-Lab).

Miguel has written three books. Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research, with Garret Christensen and Jeremy Freese, was published by University of California Press in July 2019. Written with Ray Fisman, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence and the Poverty of Nations (Princeton University Press 2008) has been translated into eleven languages, and the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof praises it as “smart and eminently readable.” Africa’s Turn? was published by MIT Press in 2009. His other writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, Forbes, and the New York Times, among other outlets.

Title: Reproducibility and Responsibility: Engineering Trust in a Time of Scientific Skepticism

Abstract: The conversation around reproducibility is often framed in terms of technical rigor but at its core, it’s about trust. As engineers, we are deeply involved in shaping how scientific knowledge is produced, shared, and ultimately judged. In this talk, I’ll reflect on how the so-called reproducibility crisis intersects with a broader erosion of public trust in science, and what that means for those of us who build the tools and pipelines behind the research. Rather than assigning blame or prescribing fixes, this is a call-to-action to consider how openness, communication, and collaboration with users can make our work not only more robust, but more meaningful. The challenges are real, but so is the opportunity to help rebuild confidence in science from the ground up.

Biography: I am a software engineer by training turned applied statistician in a School of Psychology. I am interested in how we experience our world and our impact in it. I work in a wide remit of fundamental research and industrial applications, including reproducibility of science / metascience, climate change science, machine learning, neuroscience and cyber psychology.

Title: TBC

Abstract: TBC

Biography: MARGO I. SELTZER is Canada 150 Research Chair in Computer Systems and the Cheriton Family chair in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are in systems, construed quite broadly: systems for capturing and accessing data provenance, file systems, databases, transaction processing systems, storage and analysis of graph-structured data, and systems for constructing optimal and interpretable machine learning models.

She is the author of several widely-used software packages including database and transaction libraries and the 4.4BSD log-structured file system. Dr. Seltzer was a co-founder and CTO of Sleepycat Software, the makers of Berkeley DB, the recipient of the 2021 ACM Software Sytems award and the 2020 ACM SIGMOD Systems Award.

She serves on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the (US) National Academies. She is a past chair and vice-chair of the Computer Science Committee of the National Academy of Engineering and a past President of the USENIX Assocation. She served as the USENIX representative to the Computing Research Association Board of Directors and on the Computing Community Consortium.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Sloan Foundation Fellow in Computer Science, an ACM Fellow, a Bunting Fellow, and was the recipient of the 1996 Radcliffe Junior Faculty Fellowship. She is also recognized as an outstanding teacher and mentor, having received the Phi Beta Kappa teaching award in 1996, the Abrahmson Teaching Award in 1999, the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2010, the CRA-E Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award in 2017, and a UBC Killam Teaching prize in 2023.

Professor Seltzer received an A.B. degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and a Ph. D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.