Karl Jöreskog

50Years of SEM in 50 Minutes??

 

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Biography:

Karl G Jöreskog is Professor Emeritus at Uppsala University in Sweden. He was born in Åmål, Sweden 1935 and did his undergraduate studies at Uppsala University in 1955-1957, with a major in Mathematics and Physics. He received a PhD in Statistics at Uppsala University 1963 with a dissertation entitled Statistical Estimation in Factor Analysis: A New Technique and Its Foundation, a topic suggested to him by Professor Herman Wold. He was a Research Statistician at Educational Testing Service and a Visiting Professor at Princeton University 1964-1971. During these years he published several papers in Psychometrika on the method of maximum likelihood applied to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, covariance structure analysis, and multiple group factor analysis. These papers laid the foundation for the LISREL model which was presented for the first time at the conference Structural Equation Models in the Social Sciences held at Madison Wisconsin in November 1970.

In 1971 Jöreskog returned to Sweden to become Professor of Statistics at Uppsala University. In 1984 he was appointed a Research Professor of Multivariate Statistical Analysis, a position he held until his retirement in 2000.

Jöreskog has received three Doctors honoris causa (Honorary Doctors): By the Faculty of Economics and Statistics at the University of Padua, Italy, 1993, by the Norwegian School of Economics, Bergen, Norway, 1996, and by the Faculty of Psychology at the Friedrich-Schiller- Universität, Jena, Germany, 2004. He became Honorary Professor at Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, Tianjin, China in 2006.

Jöreskog is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He served as President of Psychometric Society in 1977-78 and organized the first European Psychometric Society Meeting in Uppsala 1978.

Jöreskog received the Arnberg Prize by the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1971, the Ubbo Emmius Medal by the University of Groningen, Netherlands in 1983, the ETS Award for Distinguished Service to Measurement by Educational Testing Service in 1987, the Sells Award by the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 2000, and the Olaus Rudbeck Medal by Uppsala University in 2005.

In 2014 he was awarded Jubilee Doctor by Uppsala University at the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his promotion to PhD. Jöreskog has authored several books and numerous journal articles on factor analysis and its extensions and on structural equation modeling. Together with Dag Sörbom he developed the LISREL computer program.