Posted on 22 May 2020 by Ella Flemyng (Methods Implementation Coordinator)

Cochrane Methods is pleased to welcome Mona Nasser and Jamie-Hartmann-Boyce to the Cochrane Scientific Committee, filling vacancies for an internal Cochrane member and early-career researcher, respectively.

Mona Nasser is an Associate Professor of Evidence Based Dentistry at the University of Plymouth, UK. She has been involved with Cochrane since 2006 in areas such as conducting Cochrane Reviews, capacity building in systematic reviews and conducting methods research. Her research started with testing search filters for Iranian databases, evaluating generalisability of systematic reviews and more recently around priority setting methods and reducing research waste. Mona founded and is a Co-Convenor of Cochrane Priority Setting Methods Group and has led or been involved in key research on methods of priority setting, including ones focused on building an evaluation framework for Cochrane, an equity lens to set priorities for research and a reporting guideline. She led the research-on-research Working Group of REWARD Alliance and developed new methods on how to evaluate funding agencies and their contribution to reducing research waste. She is part of the Evidence-Based Research Network and EVBRES, working on methods research looking at how to use systematic reviews to inform future research. 

Jamie Hartmann-Boyce is a lecturer and Deputy Director of the Evidence-Based Healthcare DPhil Programme at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, UK. Jamie is an early career investigator (DPhil completed in 2017) with a proven track record of relevant research and engagement with Cochrane. As well as authoring Cochrane Reviews (including first and senior author publications, syntheses without meta-analyses, and most recently an overview and component network meta-analysis), she has contributed to a number of Cochrane projects, including the development of Cochrane’s priority setting guidance and the development of the recently published SWIM (synthesis without meta-analysis) reporting guidance. She has peer reviewed a chapter of the most recent Cochrane Handbook and has spoken at a number of Cochrane events about knowledge translation. Outside of Cochrane, she is involved in other work pushing boundaries of evidence synthesis methodology; this includes work on comparator group variability in RCTs and its impact on pooled estimates  and membership of the advisory board for the Human Behaviour Change project (harnessing machine learning to facilitate syntheses of RCTs of behavioural interventions). She also has experience conducting qualitative comparative analyses and qualitative evidence syntheses. 

Mona and Jamie join Corinna Dressler, Donna Gillies, Asbjørn Hróbjartsson, Ana Marušić, Jane Noyes, Tomas Pantoja, Philippe Ravaud, Johannes B. Reitsma, Rebecca Ryan, Nicole Skoetz, Nichole Taske and Karla Soares-Weiser. Further details on the Scientific Committee and members can be found here.

We would like to thank Julian Higgins and Christopher Schmid for their valued contributions to the Scientific Committee since it launched as they rotate off this year.