Program Description
Members of the Quantitative Division specialize in a variety of research areas involving measurement, behavioral statistics, mathematical modeling, psychometrics, methodology, and neuroimage analysis. The emphasis in the Division is on acquiring exceptionally broad and strong methodological, computational, and statistical skills, as well as focusing on a specialization domain chosen by the student, working closely with one, or more, faculty members. Faculty members and students in the Quantitative Division have research interests and collaborations that overlap with those in every other Division in the Department. Consequently, the students' specialization areas often involve substantive applications of quantitative approaches to testing, cognitive psychology, decision making, social psychology, biological psychology, neurocognition or other domains.
Curriculum
The Division offers a large array of graduate courses that cover the field of quantitative psychology in an exceptionally comprehensive manner. Students develop a specialized course of study designed to provide expertise in their particular areas of interest, but also acquire breadth in the field through coursework outside the Division and the Department, and through interdisciplinary collaborations. All students complete a first year project that is presented to the faculty at a weekly research seminar attended by all students and faculty in the Division. Most students also complete a
MS in Applied Statistics.
By the end of the fourth year, students will have completed the Comprehensive Examinations as well as the majority of their course work. The remaining years in the program are devoted to completing a dissertation, publishing data collected earlier, and prepare for a career in academia, industry, or government service.
Facilities and Resources
The facilities associated with the Division are superlative. Every faculty member has substantial laboratory space in the Psychology Department dedicated to his or her research program. Students have access to a vast array of state of the art technologies and methodologies as well as a high end computing environment. The division has its own computational laboratory and reading room. A special fund provides students resources to attend professional conferences and workshops.
Affiliated Departments, Programs, and Institutes
Many members of the Quantitative Division have appointments in the Statistics and Educational Psychology Departments. Quantitative faculty and students routinely collaborate with faculty members in these, as well as other (e.g., Political Science, Speech and Hearing), departments and research institutes on campus.
Quantitative Division Faculty
| David V. Budescu (Professor) |
 | Human judgment and decision making, with special interest in judgment, communication, and decision making under uncertainty and with incomplete or vague information; social dilemmas; behavioral statistics; and applied psychometrics. |
| Office: Room Psych 423 | (217) 333-6758 | dbudescu@uiuc.edu |
| Hua-Hua Chang (Professor) |
 | Psychometric Theory; Computerized Adaptive Testing; Cognitive Diagnosis; Large Scale Assessment; Test Equity |
| Office: Room 430 | (217) 244-5194 | hhchang@uiuc.edu |
| Sungjin Hong (Assistant Professor) |
 | Multi-way factor/component analysis; Factor analysis of sequential data (shfited and warped factor analyses); Image component analysis; Resampling and randomization; Measurement equivalence |
| Office: Room 429 | (217) 244-8296 | hongsj@uiuc.edu |
| Lawrence J. Hubert (Lyle H. Lanier Professor of Psychology Professor of Statistics and Educational Psychology) |
 | Data analysis methods in psychology and the behavioral sciences generally with particular emphasis on representation techniques; strategies of combinatorial data analysis including exploratory optimization approaches and confirmatory nonparametric methods. |
| Office: Room 433 | (217) 333-6593 | lhubert@uiuc.edu |
| Michel Regenwetter (Professor) |
 | Behavioral Social Choice; Probabilistic Measurement Theory; Mathematical Models of Individual and Collective Decision Making; Axiom Testing in Decision Making by Individuals, Groups and Electorates; Distribution-Free Random Utility Theory. |
| Office: Room 435 | (217) 333-0763 | regenwet at uiuc dot edu |
| Jesse Spencer-Smith (Assistant Professor) |
 | Prof. Spencer-Smith studies the geometric structure and dynamic properties of psychological spaces. Emotional facial expressions is one area in which he studies and models people*s perceptions using these mathematical tools. |
| Office: Room 425 | (217) 265-5493 | jbspence@uiuc.edu |
| Yongmei Michelle Wang (Assistant Professor) |
 | Structural and functional neuroimage analysis and measurement; Statistical inference, modeling, and learning for biomedical imaging and computation with applications to neuroscience; Analysis and modeling of fMRI time series; Multi-modal integration of neuroimaging data. |
| Office: Room 427 | (217) 333-3325 | ymw AT uiuc DOT edu |
Associated Faculty from Other Divisions
| Roderick P. McDonald (Professor Emeritus) |
| | |
| Office: Room 429 | (217) 333-3486 | rmcdonal@s.psych.uiuc.edu |
| Brent W. Roberts (Professor) |
 | Dr. Roberts's primary line of research is dedicated to understanding the patterns of continuity and change in personality across the decades of adulthood and the mechanisms that affect these patterns. |
| Office: Room 411 | (217) 333-2644 | broberts AT cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu |
Other Affiliates from Other Departments
| » | Anderson, Carolyn J – Educational Psychology Department (cja@uiuc.edu | Website | (217) 333-6819) |
| » | Meulman, Jacqueline J. – Leiden University, Mathematical Institute & Social and Behavioral Sciences, Data Theory Department (jmeulman@math.leidenuniv.nl | (217) 333-6819) |
