I joined the Department of Educational Psychology in 2012, after getting my PhD in Measurement, Statistics & Evaluation from the University of Maryland and postdoc at Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute. My research focuses on the development and improvement of statistical methods for analyzing educational, psychological, and more generally social and behavioral sciences data, particularly longitudinal (measures repeated on the same individuals over time) data. In the methodological framework, I predominantly work in the areas of latent growth curve modeling, mixed-effects modeling, and growth mixture modeling. The core agenda of my methodological research is to better understand nonlinear relationships among observed and latent variables using state-of-the-art latent variable methods, especially nonlinear mixed-effects models and its variants, and nonlinear structural equation models (e.g., piecewise growth models). The aim of this work is to move the educational statistics literature forward and provide researchers and practitioners the theoretical underpinnings and empirical guidance to utilize these methods to address important substantive questions in education, psychology, and human development.
