Cynthia Kroeger BITSS CatalystPublic Health
Dr Kroeger is a postdoctoral fellow and interdisciplinary researcher in the Faculty of Medicine and Health, School of Pharmacy, based at the Charles Perkins Centre (CPC). She obtained her B.S. in Psychology and Philosophy from Loyola University Chicago and her Ph.D. in Kinesiology and Nutrition from the University of Illinois at Chicago. For her dissertation work, she integrated human nutrition and psychology to study metabolic disease prevention and obesity treatment in a clinical setting. Dr. Kroeger’s research interests include obesity – particularly how brain and behavior factor into obesity development and treatment – education, biostatistics, research methods, research-reporting transparency and reproducibility. At UAB, she will receive further training in obesity, statistics, meta-research and teaching methods. She received three years of NIH funding on an F32 mechanism (F32KD107157), under the mentorship of Dr. David Allison, to research two topics of research-reporting fidelity, namely p-hacking and effect size estimation errors. She will be evaluating the prevalence of these two issues within published dietary weight-loss supplement scientific literature as well as developing and testing web-based training modules for early career investigators, designed to improve effect size estimations and data reproducibility. Dr. Kroeger is interested in becoming a BITSS Catalyst to help bridge the numerous fields studying research transparency, contribute to the training of investigators in research transparency, and promote transparency efforts that may affect research-reporting policy and academic curricula.