About Professor Ben Willem Mol

Ben Willem Mol is Professor of Obstetrics & Gynaecology at Monash University, Australia since 2018 and part-time Professor of O&G at the Amsterdam Medical Centre, The Netherlands since 2024. He combines his research work with a 0.2 FTE clinical appointment at Monash Health. Since 2017 he is recognised as a Fellow of the Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology.

Ben obtained his doctorate with honours in 1999 with his dissertation entitled: Evaluating the effectiveness of diagnostic tests: tubal subfertility and ectopic pregnancy. Ben investigates the clinical effectiveness of everyday practices and medical interventions in women’s health and reproduction. In 30 years, he has published over 1600 papers, many in high impact journals. He has published RCTs with collaborators in The Netherlands, wider Europe, United Kingdom, Australia, The United States, Canada, China, Vietnam, Brazil and South-Africa. Ben has been instrumental in capacity building in individual participant data meta-analysis (IPD-MA) in women’s health, for example evidenced by a paper in the Lancet (Jones 2022) and 37 other IPD-MAs.

In recent years, Ben has become one of the global whistle-blowers on data-fabrication in medical research, as is evident in 200 retracted papers and 70 expressions of concern among problematic studies in women’s health that he flagged. He has developed methods to screen for data-fabrication, including the TRACT checklist, that are currently used by Cochrane. The role of Ben in addressing research-fraud is acknowledged widely, for example by the leading global opinion paper The Economist that wrote about this issue in February 2023.