Dr. Kathleen Preston

Kathleen Preston earned her Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from UCLA. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, where she also serves as the Office of Research/FDC Faculty Fellow for Quantitative Research Support. Her research focuses on utilizing Item Response Theory, particularly the nominal response model, to enhance and refine psychological measurement tools. She is a recognized expert in statistical analysis using R programming, having authored a textbook on multivariate statistics in R and has delivered numerous invited presentations and workshops at national and regional conferences, universities, and federal government agencies. She teaches a range of statistics courses, including introductory, advanced, and multivariate statistics, as well as psychometrics and structural equation modeling.