Elisabeth Bik

Elisabeth Margaretha Harbers-Bik (born 1966) is a Dutch microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant. Bik is known for her work detecting photo manipulation in scientific publications, and identifying over 4,000 potential cases of improper research conduct, including 400 research papers published by authors in China from a research paper mill company. Bik is the founder of Microbiome Digest, a blog with daily updates on microbiome research, and the Science Integrity Digest blog. Bik was awarded the 2021 John Maddox Prize for "outstanding work exposing widespread threats to research integrity in scientific papers". Early life and education Bik was born in the Netherlands. Since childhood, she had a good ability to spot repeating patterns. She studied at the Utrecht University, where she obtained her MSc degree and subsequently a PhD in 1996, both in microbiology. Her dissertation was about developing vaccines for new strains of Vibrio cholerae involved in cholera epidemics across India and Bangladesh. She conducted her doctorate and her postdoctoral studies at the molecular microbiology department in the National Institute of Health and the Environment in Bilthoven. Career