The annual Robert Wherry Speaker Series honors the memory of former department chair Robert J. Wherry, Sr., who was a prominent researcher and educator in industrial/organizational and quantitative psychology. These lectures focus on methodological issues in psychological research and are funded by the Robert Wherry Development Fund and the Department of Psychology.
 

2026: Dr. Sophia Rabe-Hesketh
Simple solutions to missing data problems
 

Sophia Rabe-Hesketh is a distinguished professor at the Berkeley School of Education and the Graduate Group of Biostatistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She obtained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at King’s College, London, followed by a postdoc in image analysis at the Department of Statistics, University of Leeds, and then a tenure track position at the Department of Biostatistics, Institute of Psychiatry, University of London. She has developed a modeling framework, GLLAMM, that unifies and extends a wide range of latent variable models, including structural equation models, multilevel/mixed models, and latent class models. Much of her research has been on different aspects of latent variable modeling, such as estimation, identification, and model evaluation. A more recent interest has been in missing data problems. Rabe-Hesketh has authored six books and over 130 peer-reviewed papers, and her h-index is 81 in Google Scholar. Her honors include being elected a member of the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Statistical Association, and a lifetime honorary member of the European Association of Methodology.   

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Past Speakers

2025: Dr. Daniel J. Bauer, Rethinking moderation: Beyond Bilinear Interactions
2023: Dr. David Hand, Size matters: Measurement and understanding
2022: Dr. Kenneth A. Bollen, What longitudinal model should I choose?
2021: Dr. Geert Molenberghs, A Biostatistician’s Perspective on SARS-CoV-2: Data on Virus and People
2019: Dr. Sharon Bertsch-McGrayne, Bayes’ Rule: An underground theory that took over the world
2017: Dr. David Banks, Dynamic Text Networks
2016: Dr. Andrew Gelman
2014: Dr. Amanda Cox
2013: Dr. Brian Junker
2011: Dr. Melanie Wall, Spatially distributed latent variable models
2010: Dr. Robert C. MacCallum
2009: Dr. Richard Gonzales
2008: Dr. Steve Boker
2007: Dr. David Rindskopf
2006: Dr. Michael C. Neale
2005: Dr. George Karabatsos
2003: Dr. Daniel T. Kaplan
2002: Dr. Charles Reichardt
2001: Dr. Stephen West
2000: Dr. Leland Wilkinson
1999: Dr. John Nesselroade
1998: Dr. Roger Millsap
1997: Dr. Robert Cudeck
1996: Dr. Frank Schmidt