Jackie has always been fascinated with minds and how they work. This led her to study how brains process music and language during her undergraduate degree in cognitive science (Yale University), then synaesthesia and number cognition in my PhD (University of Oxford), and later social cognition, such as how fiction relates to empathy and understanding others.

Throughout this time, seeing the flaws and gaps in the way research is typically done led her to want to improve it. This was in the larger context of a growing ‘reproducibility crisis’ (or ‘credibility opportunity’) in psychology, where many researchers realized how misaligned incentives and unexamined research practices had led to research in the discipline as a whole being much less reliable than we would like. This led her to her current field of meta-research, which aims to study and improve how research is done.