dr.abigailpanter

Abigail T. Panter, Ph. D.

Dr. Abigail T. Panter (1989, New York University) is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a member of the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at UNC, Chapel Hill. She develops research designs and data-analytic strategies for applied research questions in health (e.g., HIV/AIDS in adolescents and adults) and education. Her publications are in measurement and surveys, multivariate data modeling, program evaluation design, and individual differences. She is PI of the Educational Diversity Project (www.unc.edu/edp), a longitudinal national study of law students at 64 law schools in the U.S. studying the impact of race/ethnicity on educational diversity at the start of and during law school. The study tracks students from registration for the LSAT through law school graduation. Other project components include focus groups with a subset of students during each year of law school and law faculty interviews about how, if at all, their pedagogy and course content is affected by student body diversity. She is also PI on projects related to online survey methodology and data modeling of nested/multilevel data. Her teaching is in the area of quantitative methods, including graduate courses in research design, structural equation modeling, exploratory factor analysis, and classical and modern approaches to test theory. Dr. Panter has received multiple teaching awards for her quantitative teaching, including 2003 APA Jacob Cohen Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and several university-wide teaching awards. She frequently consults with federal agencies and foundations on grant review, gives regular workshops on statistical modeling, program evaluation, and professional development, serves on national advisory committees and editorial boards in social/personality psychology, measurement, and quantitative methods, and is a Fellow of APA. She edited The Sage Handbook of Methods in Social Psychology (2004) and volumes on program evaluation for HIV/AIDS multisite projects.