Berkeley Neuroscience PhD student Odilia Lu has won a $7,500 Early-Career Rigor Champions Prize from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). The prize recognizes early-career scientists who have promoted or enhanced research rigor practices outside of their normal job duties, and have raised awareness around these practices.
Lu is a member of Associate Professor of Neuroscience Stephan Lammel’s lab and is funded by an Alper Fellowship in the Neurosciences. She earned the prize for addressing reproducibility issues in behavioral neuroscience by spearheading a large-scale collaborative study across five laboratories at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Stanford.
The study investigated the effects of the psychedelic drug psilocybin on mouse behavior, and all of the labs used the same standardized protocols and analysis methods. In order to produce consistent and reproducible results across labs, Lu coordinated between the labs. She also led the effort to disseminate their work.
Over 40 scientists were involved in the project, including Lammel, Berkeley Assistant Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) Andrea Gomez, Berkeley Neuroscience PhD alum Christine Liu, and Berkeley undergraduate alum Katrina White, who worked in the Gomez lab and is an incoming Berkeley MCB PhD student.
In addition to yielding new findings about the effects of psilocybin, the study also serves as a model of how laboratories can collaborate — instead of competing — to produce more rigorous research, thereby accelerating scientific progress.
“By championing this collaborative approach, I aim to shift scientific culture toward one that views coordination as a core component of rigor and to establish new standards for reliable, reproducible research across the biomedical sciences,” Lu said.
