Interdisciplinary Seminar Series

The Interdisciplinary Seminar Series on Statistical Methodology for Social and Behavioral Research aims to promote the connection between the statistics and social/behavioral science communities and to encourage more graduate students to participate in this area of interdisciplinary research.

This series is currently supported by the Department of Statistics and the Department of Educational Psychology at UConn, the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) along with the New England Statistical Society (NESS).

For questions about this seminar series, please contact the organizers: Xiaojing Wang (statistics) and Betsy McCoach (educational psychology).

Fall 2024

Friday, September 27, 2024
Dr. Kenneth Bollen, Professor at the University of North Carolina
An Overview of Latent Growth Curve Models in Longitudinal Studies of Aging

Friday, October 11, 2024
Dr. Sandip Sinharay, Educational Testing Services
Assessment of Fit of Item Response Theory Models: Full-Information And Limited-Information Methods, Item And Person Fit Aanalysis, And Beyond

Friday, November 15, 2024
Dr.Pascal R. Deboeck, University of Utah
Effects across time to modeling states of a system: a dynamical systems perspective on modeling social science data

Friday, December 6, 2024
Kristen Olson, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Recent Lessons on Mixing Mail and Web Data Collection Modes in Household Surveys

Spring 2025

Friday, Jan, 27, 2025
Walter Dempsey, Assistant Professor of Biostatistics and Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan

Friday, Feb 7, 2025
Paul De Boeck, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Psychology at Ohio State University and former president of the Psychometric Society

Friday, May 2, 2025
Dr. Nidhi Kohli, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Past Events

Spring 2024

Friday, March 29, 2024
Dr. Zhiliang Ying, Columbia University
Some Recent Developments in Educational and Psychological Measurement

Friday, April 12, 2024
Dr. Dale Zimmerman, University Of Iowa
In Defense Of Unrestricted Spatial Regression

Fall 2023

Friday, October 13, 2023
Wes Bonifay, Stanford University
Uncovering the Hidden Complexity of Statistical Models

Friday, November 3, 2023
Xinyuan Song, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Hidden Markov Models With An Unknown Number Of Hidden States

Friday, December 1, 2023
Irini Moustaki, London School of Economics and Political Science
Some New Developments On Pairwise Likelihood Estimation & Testing In Latent Variable Models

Spring 2023

Friday, Feburary 24, 2023
Ben Domingue, Stanford University
Bookmaking for Binary Outcomes: Prediction, Profits, and the IMV

Friday, March 24, 2023
Joseph Schafer, United States Census Bureau
Modeling Coarsened Categorical Variables: Techniques and Software

Friday, April 7, 2023
Luke Miratrix, Harvard University
A Bayesian Nonparametric Approach to Geographic and 2-Dimensional Regression Discontinuity Designs

Friday, April 21, 2023
Matthias von Davier
Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing in Educational Measurement

Fall 2022

Friday, September 9
Kosuke Imai, Harvard University
Experimental Evaluation of Algorithm-Assisted Human Decision-Making: Application to Pretrial Public Safety Assessment

Friday, October 7
Edsel A Pena, National Science Foundation
Searching for Truth through Data

Friday, November 11
Dylan S. Small, University of Pennsylvania
Testing an Elaborate Theory of a Causal Hypothesis

Spring 2022

All events took place online.


Friday, January 8, 3 PM
Andrew Ho, Harvard University
"Test Validation for a Crisis: Five Practical Heuristics for the Best and Worst of Times"

Friday, March 4, 3 PM
Donald Hedeker, University of Chicago
"Shared Parameter Mixed-Effects Location Scale Models for Intensive Longitudinal Data"

Friday, March 25, 3 PM
Elizabeth Stuart, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
"Combining Experimental and Population Data to Estimate Population Treatment Effects"

Friday, April 29
Luke Keele, University of Pennsylvania
"Approximate Balancing Weights for Clustered Observational Study Designs"

Fall 2021

All events took place online.


Friday, September 10, 12 PM
Susan Murphy, Harvard University
"Assessing Personalization in Digital Health"

Friday, October 1, 12 PM
Fan Li, Duke University
"Overlap Weighting for Causal Inference"

Friday, November 5, 12 PM
Jerry Reiter, Duke University
"How Auxiliary Information Can Help Your Missing Data Problem"

Friday, December 10, 12 PM
Jaime Lynn Speiser, Wake Forest University
"Machine Learning Prediction Modeling for Longitudinal Outcomes in Older Adults"

Spring 2021

All events took place online.


Friday, January 29, 12 PM
P. Richard Hahn, Arizona State University
"The Bayesian causal forest model: regularization, confounding, and heterogeneous effects"

Friday, February 26, 12 PM
Edward Ip, Wake Forest University
"Partially Ordered Responses and Applications"

Friday, March 26, 12 PM
David Dunson, Duke University
"Bayesian Pyramids: Identifying Interpretable Deep Structure Underlying High-dimensional Data"

Friday, April 16, 2 PM
Susan Paddock, NORC at the University of Chicago
"Causal Inference Under Interference in Dynamic Therapy Group Studies"

Friday, April 23, 2 PM
Jean-Paul Fox, University of Twente
"Bayesian Covariance Structure Modeling: An Overview and New Developments"

Friday, April 30, 12 PM
Jennifer Hill, Columbia University
"thinkCausal: One Stop Shopping for Answering your Causal Inference Questions"

Friday, May 21, 12 PM
David Kaplan, University of Wisconsin – Madison
"Developments and Extensions in the Quantification of Model Uncertainty: A Bayesian Perspective"

Friday, June 18, 12 PM
Jon Krosnick, Stanford University
"The Collapse of Scientific Standards in the World of High Visibility Survey Research"

Fall 2020

All events took place online.


Friday, November 20, 11:30 AM
Bengt Muthen, University of California
"Recent Advances in Latent Variable Modeling"

Friday, December 18, 12 PM
Paul De Boeck, The Ohio State University
"Response Accuracy and Response Time in Cognitive Tests"