Biographical Sketch

I received my undergraduate bachelor of arts degree in experimental psychology from the Honors College of the University of South Carolina at Columbia. My research focus, and subsequent bachelor thesis under the guidance of Dr. Thomas Cafferty, focused on the assessment of moral disengagement mechanisms in university students' perceived social interactions. I completed my masters degree in forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, under the mentorship of Dr. Keith Markus. My thesis was comprised of constructing a self report version of the Sexual Offender Needs Assessment Rating (SONAR; Hanson and Harris, 2000) by adapting its content areas into a self-administered actuarial risk assessment measure. I received my doctoral degree from the psychometrics program at Fordham University, where I completed my dissertation entitled "MLE vs. Bayesian item exposure in non-cognitive type adaptive assessments with restricted item pools: Trait estimation, item selection and reliability" under the mentorship and guidance of Dr. Charles Lewis. My present research interests include: Item Response Theory (IRT) based adaptive tests, large data model fit assessments, missing data impact (imputation / optimization algorithms), statistical software programming and Bayesian statistics.