Lukasz Widła
MY BACKGROUND:
I am a statistician and analyst with 23 years of experience. Recently involved as data analyst in EU Election Observation Missions in Liberia (2017), Sierra Leone (2018), Pakistan (2018) and Nigeria (2019) as well as expert in European Centre for Electoral Support in Afghanistan (2019, 2020).
I worked with international research institutes (MillwardBrown, Ipsos), European-scale evaluation companies (ICF International, EGO) as well as the public sector (Polish Agency for Enterprise Development, National Information Processing Institute). As a statistician, I am fluent in statistical packages, such as SPSS, Stata, Statistica, SAS, and R. I am an author or co-author of over 20 scientific publications and conference papers.
WHY AM I INTERESTED IN RESPONSIBLE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION:
Research as well as discovering new methods and indicators is part of my daily job. With my career so far, I worked on different projects and evaluations requiring innovative approach to data collection and analysis, where I could develop several ideas for complex indicators, modeling methods and data visualization. From my experiences, including a big quantitative study on innovativeness of Polish enterprise sector, I know how crucial it is to conduct responsible research and data analysis. However, there is still not enough reflection on best practices in that regard and the standards are seldom discussed. I hope that taking part in a SUPER MoRRI project as country correspondent will allow me to deep dive into the topic and understand it a little bit more. On the other hand, I am interested in doing excellent and responsible research per se. I worked on many databases, from simple tabulations of the data to machine learning neural networks, which allows me a vide overview of potential problems and barriers to good practices.
WHAT DO I HOPE TO LEARN / CONTRIBUTE AS COUNTRY CORRESPONDENT:
With my 23 years of experience I hope I’ve passed “valley of despair” from the Dunning-Kruger effect curve. Still, every day is bringing new knowledge about things I didn’t know I didn’t know. I try my best to fill those gaps and learn as much as possible to be better and more accurate in my analysis. One thing I’m usually alienated from is the fieldwork (although not entirely: all the EU missions as well as some evaluation projects were connected with fieldwork). As a SUPER MoRRI country correspondent I look forward to learning about international as well as national research integrity practices and be able to develop my own skills as a researcher. I also hope that during this work I will be able to lay my hands on some databases and prepare some meaningful statistics.