Carnegie Mellon University
March 18, 2014

Press Release: Brian Junker Selected as 2014 American Educational Research Association Fellow

Contact: Shilo Rea / 412-268-6094 / shilo@cmu.edu

Brian JunkerPITTSBURGH—The American Educational Research Association (AERA) has selected Carnegie Mellon University's Brian Junker as a 2014 AERA Fellow. Junker, professor of statistics and associate dean for academic affairs for the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, is one of 22 scholars honored this year for notable and sustained research achievements.

"We are pleased to honor these individuals for their significant contributions to education research and to the advancement of the field," said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. "AERA Fellows exemplify the best of research in terms of accomplishment, quality, mentoring, and the highest professional standards. We welcome the class of 2014 to these ranks."

Junker, who came to Carnegie Mellon as a postdoc in 1990, focuses on applications of statistics in education research, psychology and the social sciences.  He has worked in areas including nonparametric and Bayesian item response, unfolding and rating models, psychometric cognitive diagnosis models and predictive modeling of online tutoring systems, multiple-recapture census systems, statistical analysis of large randomized field trials in education, social network analysis and mixed membership models for longitudinal data in epidemiology.

He is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and served as president of the Psychometric Society (2008-2009) and editor of its journal, "Psychometrika," from 2003-2007.  He is currently co-chair of the Design and Analysis Committee for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and directs a postdoctoral training program for statistics in education research, in collaboration with RAND Corporation's Pittsburgh office.

In his role as associate dean, Junker chairs the Dietrich College Council and helps lead the college in administering curriculum, programs and policies. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses within the Department of Statistics, advises graduate students and works with postdoctoral researchers.

Junker and the 2014 AERA Fellows will join 557 current fellows when they are inducted on Friday, April 4 during the AERA annual meeting in Philadelphia.

For more information on Junker, visit http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~brian/.

###

CMU's Brian Junker (pictured above) focuses on applications of statistics in education research, psychology and the social sciences. He is one of 22 scholars honored this year by the American Educational Research Association for notable and sustained research achievements.