Dr. James H. Steiger: Recipient of the 2007 Division 5 Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions

Dr. James H. Steiger (Ph.D., Purdue University, 1976) is Professor and Director of the Quantitative Methods and Evaluation Program, Department of Psychology and Human Development, Peabody College of Education and Human Development, Vanderbilt University. He is currently an Associate Editor of Psychological Methods and was formerly Editor of Multivariate Behavioral Research. Steiger has received the Killam Research Prize and the Raymond B. Cattell Award for his work in multivariate statistics and psychometrics. President of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 2006, he co-edited (with L. L. Harlow and S. A. Mulaik) a 1997 volume, What if There Were No Significance Tests?  Steiger has contributed to behavioral statistics and psychometric theory in several areas, including (a) factor indeterminacy, its history (with P. H. Schönemann) and implications; (b) methods and software for simultaneous testing of several correlation coefficients; (c) derivation (with M.W. Browne and A. Shapiro) of the multivariate asymptotic distribution of sequential chi-square statistics; (d) development (with R. T. Fouladi) of noncentrality-based confidence intervals (and associated software) for augmenting and/or replacing traditional hypothesis tests; (e) derivation (with M.W. Browne) of a general procedure for comparing simple, multiple, partial, semi-partial, and canonical correlations; (f) analysis of human factors issues in structural modeling software. Perhaps Steiger’s best known contribution is his introduction (with J. C. Lind) of the concept of noncentrality-based fit indices (including the RMSEA) and associated confidence intervals in covariance structure modeling.

Dr. Hariharan Swaminathan: Recipient of the 2007 Division 5 Jacob Cohen Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring

Dr. Hariharan Swaminathan (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is Professor and Chair of the department of Educational Psychology, University of Connecticut. He is internationally recognized for his expertise in educational measurement, particularly in the area of item response theory. He has taught graduate level courses in multivariate statistics, item response theory, structural equation modeling, advanced psychometrics, and Bayesian statistics and received the Outstanding Teacher award from the School of Education, University of Massachusetts.  He has been invited to conduct workshops, present papers and serve as a consultant not only in the United States, but also in such countries as The Netherlands, Spain, Russia, the Republic of Georgia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, Egypt, and Indonesia.  He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the National Council for Measurement in Education.  He has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Educational Measurement (JEM), Applied Psychological Measurement (APM), Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics (JEBS), and Educational and Psychological Measurement (EPM), and as a member of the Graduate Records Examination Board, the Technical Advisory Committee for Law Schools Admission Council, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Design and Analysis committee of National Assessment of Educational Progress. Swaminathan’s research interests are in the areas of Bayesian statistics, psychometrics, item response theory and multivariate analysis including matrix calculus, time series analysis, structural equation modeling, and hierarchical models. He is the coauthor of two books (with Hambleton and Rogers) on item response theory and has more than 300 papers, chapters, technical reports, and conference presentations to his credit. His papers have appeared in Psychometrika, Multivariate Behavioral Research, APM, JEM, EPM, and JEBS.

 Dr. Guangjian Zhang: Recipient of the 2007 Division 5 Distinguished Dissertation Award

Dr. Guangjian Zhang (Ph. D., Ohio State University) is an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. He received his PhD in quantitative psychology from the Ohio State University in 2006 under the direction of Michael Browne. Guangjian also received a MS degree in Statistics at the same University. Prior to becoming a quantitative psychologist, he studied clinical psychology and social psychology. He was a licensed medical doctor in China and practiced Psychiatry for two years. He teaches the graduate courses in mathematical statistics, factor analysis, and multivariate analysis. His research interests include dynamic factor analysis, longitudinal analysis, structural equation modeling, resampling based methods, and statistical computing. Outside of the academic world, he enjoys reading novels and running.