Daniele Fanelli

Daniele graduated in Natural Sciences, earned a PhD in Behavioural Ecology and trained as a science communicator, before devoting his postdoctoral career to studying the nature of science itself - a field increasingly known as meta-science or meta-research. He has been primarily interested in assessing and explaining the prevalence, causes and remedies to problems that may affect research and publication practices, across the natural and social sciences.

How common are bias and misconduct in science? What are their main causes? Can we tell in advance which research findings are less likely to be true? Is there really a hierarchy of the sciences? If so, what makes a science "soft"? How can we foster progress and reproducibility in all fields of research? Daniele helps answer these and other questions by analysing patterns in the scientific literature using meta-analysis, regression and any other suitable methodology.

Daniele is a member of the Research Ethics and Bioethics Advisory Committee of Italy’s National Research Council, for which he developed the first research integrity guidelines, and of the Research Integrity Committee of the Luxembourg Agency for Research Integrity (LARI). Before joining LSE, he worked at the University of Edinburgh as a Marie-Curie fellow and as a Leverhulme Early-Career fellow, at the University of Montreal, Canada as Visiting Professor, and at Stanford University, USA, as Senior Scientists of the Meta-Research Innovation Center @ Stanford (METRICS).

Education

• Post-Graduate Certificate (2020), Computer Science, University of Bath, UK, with distinction
• Laurea (2001) Natural Sciences, University of Florence, 110/110 cum laude
• PhD (2005) Ethology and Animal Ecology, jointly conducted at the University of Florence and University of Copenhagen, title: Evolution of reproductive altruism and social parasitism in primitively eusocial wasps.
• Master (2006) Science Communication University of Milan