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Hello Everyone! My name is Oscar L. Olvera Astivia.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Educational Measurement and Research program in the College of Education at the University of South Florida in Tampa. I also happen to be the Communications Director of the Quantitative Methods section of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA).

I completed my PhD in Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology (MERM)  in the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada. I am also an affiliated member of the Structural Equation Modeling lab in the Quantitative Methods program in the Psychology Department.

Back in the day I was also a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Population and Public Health (in UBC) and was the lead data analyst of the Parent & Child Early Coaching Project (PACE)

If MERM sounds a tad bit obscure to you, just think about it as some intersection of Psychometrics, Statistics and research methods for the social sciences, particularly in the fields of Psychology and Education. I tend to gravitate towards the more ‘statistics-oriented’ side of research methods, so I really, really like everything that has to do with data analysis, Monte Carlo simulations, computer algorithms, etc. which goes along with my background in Math/Stats. My areas of expertise are Structural Equation Modelling, linear mixed models, Item Response Theory, etc. Oh! and I am currently in love with Copula Distributions (intro here) which don’t see a lot of love in the social sciences so I’m trying to get them popular!

If needed, you can always drop me a line at $oscar.olvera100@yahoo.com$