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Hello Everyone! My name is Oscar L. Olvera Astivia. I was born in Mexico but now live in Vancouver, Canada. I have a PhD in Measurement, Evaluation and Research Methodology (MERM)  from the University of British Columbia (UBC). I am also an affiliated member of the Structural Equation Modeling lab in the Quantitative Methods program, so I divide my time as best as I can between both programs.

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, some stuff about Bayesian methods, 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 you need to drop me a line you can always email me at $oscar.olvera100@yahoo.com$