About Rens

When Rens was working on particular projects, when he got a new position. You can all find it here!

Secundary education at 'Eckartcollege' in Eindhoven. Main courses entailed Dutch, English, mathematics, physics, biology and history.

After completing his secondary school, het started studying at Higher Vocational Education at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

To bridge the gap between graduating from Fontys and leaving the Netherlands for conducting volunteer work in Tanzania, he worked for a couple of months at day care center 'De Denneblok' in Son en Breugel, the Netherlands.

Via the organization "Missie en Jongeren", now called Edukans, Rens stayed for 8 months at the mission post in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.

After returning to the Netherlands, Rens started working at the Utrecht Medical Center. Initially on a full time basis, until he started his psychology bachelor, then part time. During his bachelor he mainly worked in night shifts at the emergency department and studied during day-time.

Rens studied psychology at Utrecht University, with a minor in Juvenile Delinquency

Rens had completed a research master programme in Development and Socialization of Children and Adolescents, also cum laude. The programme focuses on both normal and abnormal development processes. Explicit attention is given to the study of interventions and risk factors in children’s and adolescent’s cognitive and social-emotional development and adjustment. Hist master thesis on popularity and anti-social behavior was published in the Journal of Adolescence.

During his research master, Rens started working as research and teaching assistent at the faculty of Social Sciences, department methods and statistics, Utrecht University. Here he first came to know about Bayesian statistics.

Rens Obtained his PhD cum laude at the department of Methodology & Statistics at Utrecht University and after only 3.5 years. The title of his dissertation is "Informative Hypothesis: How to move beyond classical null hypothesis testing". His thesis can be download from the Utrecht University repository.

During his PhD-student period Rens was chair of the university-wide PhD council Prout. He organized the first edition of the PhD-day and invited Jorge Cham (known from PhD-comics) to inspire young researchers. He also fought bravely against the introduction of the bursary system.

Together with Joop Hox and Peter Lugtig, Rens started organizing yearly Mplus Users meetings. The aim of the Dutch Mplus Users Group is to bring together international users of Mplus and to share information, learn about new developments and discuss solutions for typical Mplus problems. We will organize such meetings twice a year for all interested researchers (applied researchers, statisticians & methodologists). New meetings are still yearly organized!

Directly after obtaining his PhD, he was appointed as assistant professor at the Methodology and Statistics department at Utrecht University in the group of Herbert Hoijtink.

Rens received the prestigious VENI grant from the Netherlands Organization of Science (NWO) to start his own research line. The topic of this grant is integrating background knowledge about traumatic stress experienced after trauma into statistical models assessing individual change over time.

Rens was president of the Early Researchers Union of the European Association of Developmental Psychology. Among many activities he organized a writing week for young scholars and they were able to publish 5 papers!

Rens was Appointed as Extra-ordinary Professor at the Optentia Research Programme at North-West University in South Africa.

Rens was appointed associate editor of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology where he deals with the section Developmetrics. The aim of the Developmetrics Special Section is twofold: to offer a pool of publications for reference when writing a paper featuring use of an instrument that has been investigated already; to publish useful and relevant data on the cross-cultural use of instruments.

Rens started organizing the International Multilevel Conferences together with Joop Hox (now retired), Leoniek Wijngaard and Mirjam Moerbeek. The conferences are about all aspects of statistical multilevel analysis: innovative applications, theory, software, and methodology.

Rens was awarded the APA award for the best dissertation in the field of Quantitative and Qualitative Methods (division 5). A list of the winners.

Rens was appointed as associate professor at the Methodology and Statistics department at Utrecht University

Rens has received the highly regarded, prestigious VIDI grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) to start one’s own research group. The VIDI grant is awarded to outstanding scholars only: exclusively the top 10% of the international peer group can get this type of funding allocated to them. The topic of his grant is conducting research on the inclusion of expert opinions in statistical analyses when data is limited.

Rens became member of the Young Academy (Jonge Academie) of The Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). This is an association inviting annually only the ten most-inspiring, academically challenging scholars from any discipline to become a member. He uses this position to promote responsible research practices and transparency amongst scholars, as well as a healthy working environment for scholars in the project called “Livingroom of Science”.

Rens was asked to become ambassador of FD-Young Circle, a group of young thinkers discussing how to take the Netherlands to the next step. In the FD young circle, scholars, business people and civil servants are collaborating together to find answers to contemporary challenges in Dutch society.

Rens and his team obtained a grant from the Research IT programme for innovative research projects and stareted the project Automated Systematic Reviewing (ASReview).

Rens started organizing the S4 Conferences. S4 stands for "Small Sample Size Solutions" and the conferences are about all aspects of statistical and methodological solutions for dealing with small samples.

Rens was elected member of the the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP). SMEP is ann organization of researchers interested in multivariate quantitative methods and their application to substantive problems in psychology and related fields. Many distinguished scientists in this field have been active members of SMEP.

Rens was appointed as Full Professor of Statistics for Small Sample Sizes

Een jaar na zijn benoeming tot hoogleraar zal hij op dinsdag 21 januari zijn oratie houden getiteld " Machines Vervangen Wetenschappers".