I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology. I received my Ph.D. in quantitative psychology at the U of I in 2017. After a one-year stint (2017-2018) in the psychology department at the University of California, Merced, I returned to Illinois in Fall 2018. My primary area of research is in educational and psychological measurement. More broadly, I am interested in the improvement of methods used for analyzing multivariate data in the behavioral sciences as a whole. As a methodologist, I work collaboratively with others in education, psychology, and other behavioral sciences around the U of I community.

Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017

M.A. in Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013

M.S. in Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012

B.S. in Psychology and Mathematics, Central Michigan University, 2009

My scholarship is focused primarily on issues concerning measurement in psychology and education. The field of measurement involves the creation of mathematical and technical solutions to many highly practical goals. For instance, measurement has a great impact on society through its use in selecting, classifying, and diagnosing people. Furthermore, measurement allows researchers to test theories regarding such societally important traits that would otherwise be unobservable, such as abilities, attitudes, and personality.

As a member of the measurement field, my research seeks to produce and investigate quantitative methodologies useful for the modeling of psychological and educational traits, the construction of tests and measurement tools, and the investigation of behavioral data. This is primarily through the lens of item response theory (IRT). My scholarship can be summarized in terms of three themes: 1) computer adaptive testing, especially the usage of response times; 2) investigating models used to account for guessing and slipping in responses, such as four-parameter IRT models, and their extensions; and 3) modeling response processes using tree-based IRT models. I also have extensive interest and knowledge in Bayesian statistical methods.