JQBB - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychology / Arizona State University
- Foundation Professor
- Professor
David P. MacKinnon is a Foundation Professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. He has wide ranging interests in statistics and methodology but his primary interest is in the area of statistical methods to assess how prevention and treatment programs achieve their effects. He is affiliated with the Prevention Intervention Research Center and the Research in Prevention Laboratory. He came to ASU in 1990 from the University of Southern California's Institute for Prevention Research, where he had been an assistant professor of research (1986-1990).
Professor MacKinnon teaches graduate analysis of variance, mediation analysis, and statistical methods in prevention research courses. He has given numerous workshops and invited presentations in the U.S. and Europe. In 2011, he received the Nan Tobler Award from the Society for Prevention Research for his book on statistical mediation analysis. He has served on federal review committees including a term on the Epidemiology and Prevention Research review committee and was a consulting editor for the journal, Prevention Science. Professor MacKinnon has been principal investigator on many federally funded grants and has had a National Institute on Drug Abuse grant to develop and evaluate methods to assess mediation since 1990. He recently received the MERIT award for this mediation analysis research. He is a Thomson-Reuters and Clarivate highly cited researcher. In 2017, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association's Division on Quantitative and Qualitative Methods. He is president-elect of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology.
Job Titles:
- Associate at the Center for Integrative Developmental Science
Dr. Dakota Cintron a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Integrative Developmental Science at Cornell University. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Evidence for Action (E4A) Methods Laboratory at University of California, San Francisco. He received my PhD in educational psychology with a concentration in research methods, measurement, and evaluation from the Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut. He earned an EdM in measurement and evaluation and MS in applied statistics from Teachers College at Columbia. In the past, he has held professional positions at the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research, the National Institute for Early Education Research, and New Visions for Public Schools.
Dr. Cintron's research focuses on the application, development, and assessment of quantitative methods in the social and behavioral sciences. His areas of research interest include topics such as item response theory, latent variable and structural equation modeling, longitudinal data analysis, hierarchical linear modeling, and causal inference. With the E4A Methods Laboratory, Dr. Cintron's work is motivated by promoting and developing of quantitative methods that support the creation of rigorous evidence that improves population health and reduces health inequities and disparities.
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychological Sciences / University of Missouri
Dr. Ed Merkle's research involves a mix of psychometric modeling and the experimentation/modeling that arises from cognitive science and mathematical psychology. His specific research includes Bayesian latent variable models, forecasting and subjective probability, psychometric measurement, and statistical modeling.
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychology / University of Virginia
Dr. Hudson Golino's research focuses on quantitative methods, psychometrics and machine learning applied in the fields of psychology, health and education. He is particularly interested in new ways to assess the number of dimensions (i.e. latent variables) underlying multivariate data using network psychometrics.
He has been developing a new set of quantitative techniques and metrics, integrated in a general approach - termed Exploratory Graph Analysis (EGA), that is part of the relatively new area of network psychometrics. Particularly, he combines network science, information and quantum information theory, as well as computational methods to address fundamental problems in psychometrics, with the following goals: (1) to improve the estimation of the number of latent factors in an automatic (or semi-automatic) way, (2) to develop innovative fit indices for structural analysis and dimensionality assessment/reduction, (3) to improve the estimation and the interpretability of latent factors in intensive longitudinal data, (4) to develop new techniques for item analysis from a network psychometrics perspective (including, for example, network loadings, item parameters and new metrics of reliability), and (5) to construct general representations of structure built from intraindividual variability, quantifying the homogeneity of individuals using new metrics of complexity.
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychology / Simon Fraser University
- Professor
Dr. Kate Slaney is a Professor in the History, Quantitative, Theoretical Psychology (HQT) stream of the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University (SFU). She completed her Ph.D. at SFU, with a specialty in psychometric theory, in 2006. She immediately took up a tenure-track position in the Psychology Department at SFU. Her research interests and expertise span a number of areas, including historical and conceptual analysis of methodological approaches within psychological science, philosophy of psychological and related sciences, theoretical and applied psychometrics, and examination of statistical inferences practices within psychology. More recently, she has embarked on two new avenues of research: the first involves an examination of rhetoric and other common styles of reasoning and writing in psychological research discourses; the second explores current views and perspectives of scholars and the lay public regarding the moral dimensions of intersubjectivity and community engagement.
Job Titles:
- Department of Education / University of California, Los Angeles
Li Cai is a statistician and quantitative psychologist. He is a professor of Advanced Quantitative Methodology at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies with a joint appointment in the quantitative area of the UCLA Department of Psychology. He is also Director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing, Managing Partner at Vector Psychometric Group.
He invented the Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro algorithm for inference in high-dimensional latent variable models that had been intractable with existing solutions. The algorithm was recognized as a mathematically rigorous breakthrough in the "curse of dimensionality" and garnered numerous top-tier publications and national awards.
Dr. Michael Hallquist is an Associate Professor in the Clinical Psychology Program and Quantitative Psychology Program in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is also the Director of the Developmental Personality Neuroscience Laboratory at UNC Chapel Hill. His research seeks to characterize how the disrupted maturation of neurobehavioral systems during adolescence and young adulthood is associated with the emergence of emotional and interpersonal problems. As a clinician, his approach integrates third-wave behavior therapies (especially Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), short-term psychodynamic therapy, and cognitive-behavioral approaches.
Job Titles:
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dr. Michael Hallquist is an Associate Professor in the Clinical Psychology Program and Quantitative Psychology Program in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. He is also the Director of the Developmental Personality Neuroscience Laboratory at UNC Chapel Hill. His research seeks to characterize how the disrupted maturation of neurobehavioral systems during adolescence and young adulthood is associated with the emergence of emotional and interpersonal problems. As a clinician, his approach integrates third-wave behavior therapies (especially Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), short-term psychodynamic therapy, and cognitive-behavioral approaches.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Advanced Quantitative Methods
- Department of Education / University of Los Angeles
Minjeong Jeon, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Advanced Quantitative Methods in the UCLA Department Education. Dr. Jeon received her Ph.D in Quantitative Methods from UC Berkeley. Before joining UCLA faculty, she was an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Psychology at Ohio State University. Her research revolves around developing, applying, and estimating latent variable models for studying measurement and growth. Her recent research topics include latent space modeling, process modeling, and joint analysis.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the Psychological Methods
- Department of Psychological Methods / University of Amsterdam
Dr. van Bork is an assistant professor at the Psychological Methods department of the University of Amsterdam. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburg.
The following provides a brief description of projects she work's on.
Job Titles:
- Department of Economics / University of Chicago
James J. Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, a Nobel Memorial Prize winner in economics and an expert in the economics of human development. Through the university's Center for the Economics of Human Development, he has conducted groundbreaking work with a consortium of economists, developmental psychologists, sociologists, statisticians and neuroscientists showing that quality early childhood development heavily influences health, economic and social outcomes for individuals and society at large. Heckman has shown that there are great economic gains to be had by investing in early childhood development.
Heckman received his B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1971. Since 1973, he has served as a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, where he directs the Economics Research Center, the Center for the Economics of Human Development, and the Center for Social Program Evaluation at the Harris School of Public Policy. He is a professor of law at the University of Chicago School of Law, senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Professor Heckman's work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, with special emphasis on models of individuals and disaggregated groups, and to the problems and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity, and unobserved counterfactual states. In the early 1990s, his pioneering research on the outcomes of people who obtain the GED certificate received national attention. His findings, which found great deficiencies in the alleged value of the degree, spurred debates across the country on the merits of obtaining the certificate.
His recent research focuses on human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood development. His research has given policymakers important new insights into such areas as education, job-training programs, minimum-wage legislation, anti-discrimination law, social supports and civil rights.
He is currently editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economics and the American Statistical Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Art and Sciences.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at the University of Missouri - Columbia
Wolfgang Wiedermann is an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His primary research interests include the development of methods for causal inference, methods to determine the causal direction of dependence in observational data, and methods for person-oriented research settings. He has edited several books on new developments in statistical methods and published his work in top tier journals. He currently serves as an associate editor for Behaviormetrika and the Journal for Person-Oriented Research.