My academic background is rooted in understanding human attitudes, thoughts, and behaviors through the lens of rigorous mathematical modeling. As an undergraduate student at the University of Miami, I studied Psychology (major) and Mathematics (minor). As a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I earned two master’s degrees (Psychology and Statistics) and a doctoral degree in Quantitative Psychology. After graduate school, I did a three-month (summer) post doc in Statistics at Illinois. In the fall, I was hired as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Statistics at Illinois, where I worked for one year before joining the faculty at Minnesota.
I am currently a tenured Associate Professor with a 50/50 joint appointment in Psychology and Statistics at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. I also hold a graduate faculty appointment in Data Science, and I am a “Core Member” of the University of Minnesota’s Data Science and AI Hub. I have research interests in artificial intelligence, computational statistics, machine learning, and multivariate nonparametric methods with a focus on applications in the psychological and biomedical sciences. My papers and open-source software, which are inspired by my collaborations, strive to solve general methodological and computational problems in ways that work both in theory and in practice—when the data are messy.
