Universitat de Barcelona

Alberto Maydeu Olivares.

Acadèmic

Professor at the Faculty of Psychology Alberto Maydeu Olivares has been elected president for the period 2013-2014 of the Psychometric Society, an international scientific organization devoted to the advancement of quantitative measurement practices in this field of science. Approximately half of its members come from North America, but there are also members from Europe (particularly from the Netherlands), Japan and China.

What do psychometricians do? Besides teaching at the university, experts in psychometrics work for pharmaceutical companies (proving the effect of drugs, analysing the quality of life), in marketing (examining the determinants of consumer behaviour), education (assessing the results of education programmes, such as PISA), etc. At a time when finding work is difficult, there are not enough psychometricians to meet the demand, and the situation is not likely to change for many years, especially in the United States.

Professor Maydeu earned his PhD in Psychometrics at the University of Illinois, funded by a Fulbright-La Caixa scholarship. After holding different academic positions at Carlos III University and IE Business School in Madrid, he has spent most of his career at the University of Barcelona. He has also been visiting research scholar at the universities of Michigan and North Carolina.

Among other distinctions, he was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Award by the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Young Investigator Award by the Government of Catalonia, and the Cattell Award by the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. He is currently an ICREA-Acadèmia Distinguished Professor.

Maydeu, author of over sixty papers in international journals, is also the publisher of the work Contemporary Psychometrics (Erlbaum, 2005) and Handbook of quantitative methods in psychology (SAGE, 2009). He is known, especially, for his contributions to modelling preference and choice, together with lecturer Ulf Böckenholt (Northwestern University, United States); for his studies on goodness-of-fit testing, together with Harry Joe (University of British Columbia, Canada), and for his contributions to item response modelling of paired comparison, together with Anna Brown, who was his doctoral student at the UB, currently at the University of Cambridge.