Congratulations to Dr. Alex Rich!

VACLab-er Alex Rich successfully defended his dissertation on July 19, 2022. His dissertation, titled ‘Building and Evaluating Detailed Graphical Financial Conflict of Interest Disclosures in Medical Research,’ explores the effects of visually representing authors’ financial conflicts of interest within scientific publications. His dissertation describes algorithmic methods for linking at scale the authors of articles with payments recorded in the Open Payments database, a visualization for representing this data for readers, and results from a user study showing how these visualizations may influence reader attitudes around published research. Alex also studied author attitudes and reactions to automatic disclosure of their own data as part of the publishing process. Finally, Alex analyzed barriers to the realization of his approach through a qualitative study of key stakeholders in scientific publishing and research institutions.

Dr. Rich has joined the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as a public health analyst to apply his skills to public health coordination and response at the federal level.

Congratulations to the newest VACLab alumnus, Dr. Alex Rich!