Meet the Budescu Lab

Vicky Song

Vicky is a second year graduate student in the Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology program. Her primary research interests are in decision making and judgement under uncertainty, decision trees, applied statistics, cognitive technologies, and data mining. She is currently doing research in evaluating and developing probability-based selection models for high-stakes decision making. Vicky graduated with a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Yuyu Fan

Yuyu is a third-year student in Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology. Her research interests lie in model construction and test evaluation. She is currently doing research in the field of decisions and choices, and focusing on modeling people's preferences in multi-stage lotteries. She also does research in educational testing, which uses Hidden Markov Models for the purpose of quality control. Her master thesis studied the measurement invariance of latent factors and the moderated mediation relationship between them using multi-group Structural equation modeling. She also did cross-culture reliability and validation studies of personality assessment scales using factor analysis and IRT. She has experience in experimental design, multivariate analysis, HLM, SEM, and data mining, and she applies different tools and programming languages (R, SAS, SPSS, Mplus, Python, Z-tree, etc.) to design experiments and conduct data analysis.

Saemi Park

Saemi is a third-year graduate student in the Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology program. Her main interest is to understand overconfidence in probability interval judgements and to reduce the bias with the approach of 'Wisdom of Crowds'. She is now investigating the effect of WoC on two sources of uncertainty, aleatory and epistemic ones.

Emily H Ho

Emily is a 4th year doctoral student in the Psychometrics & Quantitative Psychology program. Her current work at the JDM Lab include decision making under uncertainty in a public policy context and the derivation of distance measures between nonparametric distributions with various properties. Her secondary research interest is in psychometric analysis. Completed and in progress projects include: psychometric evaluation of a clinical trauma questionnaire (Rasmussen, Verkuilen, Ho, and Fan, 2015), robust estimation of reliability in small samples, and examination of vertical scale drift on repetitious horizontal equating. Emily graduated with a BA in Psychology (minors in Business & Creative Writing, cum laude) from New York University (2012) as a Trustees Scholar, and is a Psychometrics Intern at the College Board for the academic years 2014-2016.

Meirav Attali

Meirav is a third-year graduate student in the psychometric program. Her research interests include assessment for learning, and the relationship between assessment design and elicitation of effort and engagement to improve learning and performance. Meirav's interests also touch on issues of optimal scoring to adjust teaching and learning (such as categorical scoring for diagnostic purposes), gamifying assessment in increase engagement, and self-adapted testing as well as self-regulated learning. In her dissertation, she is investigating the effects of feedback and scoring on choice behavior in self-adapted tests. Meirav is particularly excited to incorporate ideas from decision making theory into self-adapted testing and self-regulating learning.

Daniel Benjamin

Daniel is pursuing a doctoral degree in Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology. His research interests include theoretical and applied topics in judgement and decision-making focusing on situations when the formulation of otherwise similar information alters behavior including 1) sources of uncertainty and ambiguity, 2) the communication of uncertain information, especially in partisan domains, and 3) behavioral methodology. He recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Dissertation Research Grant to develop research entitled "The Coupled Impact of Conflict and Imprecision from Multiple Expert Forecasts." Daniel's research also examines the perceptual effects of climate change information on the public and policymakers. Additional research interests include judge-adviser systems, information search, experiential decision-making, subjective probability elicitation, framing effects and cognitive biases.