Keynote and Featured Speakers
Bengt Muthen
http://www.statmodel.com/bmuthen/
Bengt Muthén obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden and is Professor Emeritus at UCLA. He was the 1988-89 President of the Psychometric Society and the 2011 recipient of the Psychometric Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He has published extensively on latent variable modeling and is one of the developers of the Mplus computer program, which implements many of his statistical procedures.
Dr. Muthén’s research interests focus on the development of applied statistical methodology in areas of education and public health. Education applications concern achievement development while public health applications involve developmental studies in epidemiology and psychology. Methodological areas include latent variable modeling, analysis of individual differences in longitudinal data, preventive intervention studies, analysis of categorical data, multilevel modeling, and the development of statistical software (namely Mplus!).
Judea Pearl
http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/jp_home.html
Judea Pearl is a professor of computer science and statistics at UCLA, and distinguished visiting professor at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty of UCLA in 1970, where he currently directs the Cognitive Systems Laboratory and conducts research in artificial intelligence, human reasoning and philosophy of science. Pearl has authored several hundreds research papers and three books: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000;2009), He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAI and the Cognitive Science Society. Pearl received the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science and the 2011 David Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. In 2012, he received the Technion’s Harvey Prize and the ACM A.M. Turing Award. for the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning. (http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/pearl_2658896.cfm).
Linda Collins
http://methodology.psu.edu/people/lcollins
Linda Collins is Director of The Methodology Center and Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, Dr. Collins has published numerous books and journal articles in her areas of research including Latent Class and Latent Transition Analysis: With Applications in the Social, Behavioral, and Health Sciences, published by Wiley in 2010. Her interests include experimental and non-experimental design and models for longitudinal data.
Kristopher Preacher
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/psychological_sciences/bio/kristopher-preacher
Dr. Preacher is Assistant Professor in the Quantitative Methods program. His research concerns the use (and combination) of structural equation modeling and multilevel modeling to model correlational and longitudinal data. Other interests include developing techniques to test mediation and moderation hypotheses, bridging the gap between substantive theory and statistical practice, and studying model evaluation and model selection in the application of multivariate methods to social science questions. He serves on the editorial boards of Psychological Methods, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Communication Methods and Measures, and Multivariate Behavioral Research.
Yves Rosseel
Yves Rosseel obtained his PhD from Ghent University, Belgium. He is now an associate professor at the Department of Data Analysis, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University. His research interests include neuroimaging data analysis, connectivity and causality, and structural equation modeling. He is the author of lavaan, an R package for structural equation modeling.