Done
Recording things i’ve done which don’t go under Papers, Talks or Newsletter: https://tomstafford.substack.com/. For current preoccupations, see here.
2026
2026-02-02 to 2028-01-18 Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge
2026-02-19: Letter published in Nature: The funding system needs fixing — but it’s not a ‘waste of time and money’ - see also The point of no return?
2026-01-28: Chaired workshop on Demand Management at Wellcome Trust
2026-01-02: Published The 1,000 neuron challenge at The Transmitter. ‘A competition to design small, efficient neural models might provide new insight into real brains—and perhaps unite disparate modeling efforts.’
2025
2025-12-18: Published A new model moves research in a more democratic direction – it could be faster and fairer too at WonkHE, with Anna Butters.
2025-10-25: Participated in the ARRC policy studio on ECR precarity, at the University of Cambridge, UK.
September 2025: Our working paper on Distributed Peer Review published. Media: LSE Impact Blog, Science|Business, Research Professional News, LaborJournal, Table and my newsletter
2020 - 2025 I was Research Practice Lead for the University of Sheffield
2025-07-31 Published (late!) the showcase for this year’s class of PSY6422 Data Analysis and Visualisation (check out previous year’s showcases on the course pages)
2025-07-01 Science runs a story on our work on Distributed Peer Review: Should grant applicants judge competitors’ proposals? Unorthodox approach gets two real-world tests doi: 10.1126/science.zap69fh
2025-07-01 Quoted in Nature for this story on Distributed Peer Review: How to speed up peer review: make applicants mark one another. Nature 643, 313-314 (2025) doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02090-z
June 29th: Helped organise and run ECR Metascientst Happy Hour, a networking event before Metascience 2025 hosted by the UKRN. Report: How to make a career in Metascience: Advice from Experts
June 16-18th: Panel DPR on DPR at International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI), Copenhagen. Here’s me and Anders Smith from Villum Fonden
June: Stafford, T., Pinfield, S., Butters, A., & Benson Marshall, M. (2025). RoRI Insights: Applicants as reviewers - a Guide to Distributed Peer Review (Version 1). Research on Research Institute. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29270534.v2
May : external advisor and auditor for UKRI’s first trial of Distributed Peer Review (read about this in their report A Year in Metascience, published 2025-06-30)
May - June: AFIRE Sprint on AI in grantmaking
May 2025: Launch of the Editors and Publishers Network at the University of Sheffield, following the event I convened in 2024.
2025-05-21 Final of our 2024-25 AFIRE Funder Forum series; showcasing experiments by research funders. Talk recordings are on the website, as well as the RoRI YouTube channel.
April 2025: Attended Fostering Accountability for the Integrity of Research Studies (FAIRS), St John’s College, Oxford
2025-03-04: Chaired the UKRN Institutional Leads retreat in Cardiff. Here we are:
2025-01-14: republished on the LSE Impact Blog Do Community Notes work?
2024
2024-12-23: Made a webscraping bot on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@PAXscraper, which reports stats from PsyArXiv:
2024-12-19: Kate took this picture in Elm
2024-11-28/29: Represented UKRN at the Swiss National Science Foundation’s Research on Research Conference, Bern.
2024-10-23: Inaugural event of the AFIRE Funder Forum
2024-10-07: Nature editorial on our project with VolkswagenStiftung: New peer-review trial lets grant applicants evaluate each other’s proposals
2024-09: Trip to China. News story on this: Navigating Research Culture and Funding Practices: Highlights from Shanghai
2024-08-30: Article in New Scientist with Kate Dommett: Is digital technology really swaying voters and undermining democracy?. My newsletter on this
2024-06-21: Research Matters magazine (with Shaun Leamon): Experiments in research funding to reduce research bureaucracy
2024-06-18: Early results from our project with Volkswagen Foundation: Researchers optimistic about Distributed Peer Review
2024-06-17: Hosted AI replication game at University of Sheffield with the Institute for Replication
2024-05-23: Organised networking event for University of Sheffield editors
2024-06-21: 2024 Showcase for Data Analysis and Visualisation MSc Students
Febuary 2024: Oliver Bray shared his MSc project: Bray, O. J., & Stafford, T. (2024, February 5). No Far-Transfer from Ten Years of Feedback on Task Length Estimation: A Case Study. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fsr53. - see also Ollie’s blog: Can Feedback Improve Your Productivity Estimates? Data from a 10-Year Case Study Ollie Bray
2024-01-03: BBC Future article Tetris: How a US teenager achieved the ‘impossible’ and what his feat tells us about human capabilities
2023
December 2023 : joined the PsyArXiv Scientific Advisory Board and approved as chair of the public engagement subcommittee. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv
2023-11-10; Worked with Lingyu-Meng on a novel visualisation of how group discussion shifts people’s opinions : https://lingyu-meng.github.io/convergence-valence_space/
2023-11-07-: elected Chair of UKRN Institutional Leads group
Sept 2022 - Sept 2023 Coordinator for UKRN Open Research programme, workstream 1: training
2023 August made https://tomstafford.github.io/imdb/, showing change in crowdsourced ratings of summer movies:
2023 July Consulted on University of Sheffield Guidelines on Generative AI
2023-05-23 Analysis of Open Editors data: https://tomstafford.github.io/editors/
2023 onwards: member of University of Sheffield Research Culture Steering Board, which provides leadership and coordination for the development of institutional research culture.
2023-05-18 Chaired UKRN/RoRI panel on The Future of Peer Review. (Recording and DOI:10.52843/cassyni.50wy02, Slides)
2023-05-05 Co-author on UKRN working paper on Open Research Training Resources and Priorities, (news item)
2023-05-10 Cited in Science, Innovation and Technology Committee report on Reproducibility and research integrity. Written evidence:Commercial involvement in academic publishing is key to research reliability and should face greater public scrutiny
2023-04-15 Chaired Straight to the Facts: Can we save public debate? A dialogue with Will Moy
2023-02-19 Updated my minimal working example of RMarkdown + papaja + tenzing for APA formatted manuscript preparation, to include a rights retention statement : https://github.com/tomstafford/rmarkdown_apa
2023-02-06 Teaching my MSc course in Data Management and Visualisation. Materials, all CC-BY, and containing many links and resources on all things research project management, data wrangling and #dataviz here https://tomstafford.github.io/psy6422/
2023-02-01 and forever: taking part in UCU strike action
2023-01-24 Attended launch of N8 Research Partnership stands up for researchers with new Rights Retention statement
2023-01-17 Celebrating University of Sheffield announcing rights retention policy
2023-01-16 Retired the Choice Engine bot
2023-01-09 Graduation for Psychological Research Method with Data Science MSc class of 2021
2023-01-06 Updated: Experiment Design Checklist https://tomstafford.github.io/psy-checklist/
2023-01-01 Archive of tweets 2008-2022
2022
2022-08-29 News: Advanced notice: Research On Research Institute seeks postdocs
2022-12-25 News: Christmas Message 2022
Probably I did other things this year, but the only thing I can find a note of is
2022-03-09 Released code for making your own ‘hybrid images’. They look different from different distances (vision science people: it is about putting different image information into different spatial frequencies)
2021
2021-01-26 News: PhD opportunity: Informing citizens?
2021-11-25 News: Job: Open Research Training Lead
2021 onwards: member, University of Sheffield Open Research Advsory Group, “providing strategic leadership in the ongoing development, promotion and implementation of the policies and practices supporting the University’s commitment to Open Research”
2021 to 2024: member of University of Sheffield Research Excellence Working group, which developed, consulted on and agreed a common definition and understanding of ‘excellence’ for use alongside the institutional research strategy.
2021: The Experiment Design Checklist
Led development and adoption of the University of Sheffield statement on Open Research
2020
2020-07-08 News: Understanding online political advertising
2020-09-03 News: Engaging dialogue generated from argument maps
2020-09-09 News: Research Practice Lead for the University of Sheffield
2020: The Letters of Pope Gregory VII - pilot project (with Charles West and George Litchfield)
2020 onwards: member, University Vice President for Research’s Strategy Group (VPSG)
2019
2019-01-15 News: Remarks at ‘Re-energising the narrative: Human rights in the digital age’
Animated Itinerary of King John, Mapping The Itinerary of King Edward I, Mapping Papal Letters (with Charles West)
2018
2018-01-02 News: Reproducibility
2018-04-30 News: Symposium on Robust Research Practices
2018-06-16 News: Teaching: How reliable is cognitive neuroscience?
2018-06-20 News: Quit while you’re ahead
2018-08-14 News: Preprints
2018-09-20 News: The Choice Engine
2018: @ChoiceEngine - an interactive essay about the psychology of free will
2017
2017-11-01 News: Seminar - Framing effects in the field: Evidence from two million bets
2017-11-09 News: Pre-registration
2017-11-09 News: The Open Science Framework
2017-12-01 News: Funded PhD studentship
2017-12-14 News: Cyberselves: How immersive technologies will impact our future selves
2017-12-27 News: 2017 review
2017-11-09: Open science essentials in two minutes pre-registration
2017 to 2021: member, University of Sheffield Open Access Advisory Group, representing Faculty of Science, providing strategic overview of scholarly communication
2017 Organised Mind Matters ‘a series of events based on various psychological research to bring knowledge to the general public and showcase Sheffield as a hub for psychology!’
2015 Data Scientist in Residence at folksy.com. See Folksy data analysis: buyer decision time
2012 - 2017 Wrote a column for BBC Future
Earlier
2016
2016-03-16 News: Dangers and advantages in the idea of implicit bias
2016-06-07 News: A hierarchy of critique
2016-06-16 News: New paper: Improving training for sensory augmentation
2016-07-04 News: Why don’t we trust the experts?
2016-07-05 News: We are European scholars
2016-08-08 News: Cognitive Science Conference, Philadelphia
2016-10-12 News: CogSci @ Sheffield
2016-10-12 News: Internship: Public engagement coordinator
2016-10-21 News: Using Candy Crush to study perceptual learning
2016-12-20 News: 2016 review
2015
2015-06-19 News: Power analysis for a between-sample experiment
2015-09-02 News: Bias mitigation
2015-12-02 News: Crowdsourcing analysis, an alternative approach to scientific research
2015-12-15 News: Individualised student feedback
2015-12-16 News: 2015 review
2014
2014-01-01 News: Tracing the trajectory of skill learning with a very large sample
2014-03-12 News: First visualise, then test
2014-03-12 News: New paper: Performance breakdown effects dissociate from error detection
2014-08-07 News: New paper: Wiki users get higher exam scores
2014-09-16 News: Teaching: What it means to be critical
2014-09-30 News: New grant - Reduced habitual intrusions: an early marker for Parkinson’s?
2014-10-20 News: Event: Crowdsourcing psychology data - online, mobile, big data approaches
2014-12-01 News: Neuroimaging as a marker of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
2013
2013-02-04 News: Six clear writing tips for exam success
2013-02-18 News: New paper: The path to learning: Action acquisition is impaired
2013-07-03 News: New paper: The discovery of novel actions
2013-07-05 News: The department’s first Director of Public Engagement
2013-09-12 News: No learning where to go without first knowing where you’re coming from
2013-09-27 News: New PhD Student: Angelo Pirrone
2013-12-18 News: New project - Bias and blame
2012
2012-12-21 News: Three PhD studentships in decision making
2012-12-03 News: New paper: Memory enhances the mere exposure effect
2012-11-27 News: Frontiers special issue on intrinsic motivation and open-ended development
2012-10-30 News: Brain network: Social media and the cognitive scientist
2012-10-24 News: Project LongArm: Drawing Machines
2012-09 I wrote some of the code in LongArm, a robot which draws labrynthine patterns, by Matthias Jones
2012-09-06 Wall Street Journal cover. The Cognitive Science Safari] was a street-tour of classic social psychology experiments, in Berlin as part of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. I was on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
https://tomstafford.github.io/images/ 2012-06-04 News: New paper: A novel task for the investigation of action acquisition
2012-06-06 News: Fundamentals of learning: the exploration-exploitation trade-off
2011
2011: The Tea Taste Test – explaining why statistics are important to psychology, using a controversy of how to make a cup of tea.