Statistician Daniel Oberski joins the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

The Utrecht-based researcher Daniel Oberski is one of the ten new members of the prestigious Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent platform of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in which young top-rank scientists occupy themselves with the development of a vision on science and science policy. His official appointment is on 26 March 2018.

Daniel Oberski

鈥淗appy and enthusiastic, of course,鈥 is Oberski鈥檚 answer to the question how he responded to the appointment. 鈥淏ut that's also how I was when I conversed with the Academy earlier this year. The Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences is a beautiful platform for researchers. And the audience you can reach suddenly becomes bigger: ministries are occasionally advised by them as well.鈥

CBS and Nature

The Utrecht-based statistician is the creator of often-used methods that find the effects of measuring errors and remove them from research results. His work is used in software for questionnaires and in reports of Statistics Netherlands. He also helped climate researchers who were looking for a statistical model to analyse all their data. This year, that resulted in a publication in the renowned magazine Nature.

Niet iedereen is er zich van bewust dat elk onderzoek een mate van onzekerheid kent

Uncertainty

In the upcoming five years, the duration of a membership term, Oberski wants to see if he and the other Academy members can start projects with the theme 鈥榰ncertainty鈥. 鈥淓very research project comes with a certain degree of uncertainty. Not everyone is aware of that. This means that, especially for outsiders, it's not always that simple to judge research results. With some knowledge of research methods and statistics, everyone should become more capable of interpreting research results.鈥

On the , Oberski and the other nine joining researchers are introduced. Oberski is already a member of the Utrecht Young Academy.