Lesa Hoffman, UI College of Education professor of Educational Measurement and Statistics, was recently elected president of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP).

Hoffman serves as president-elect until October 2022, at which point she will be president of the society for a year. 

SMEP is a society with 65 active members, all of whom are elected into the group. The group is prominent in quantitative methods, as many editors of the top quantitative methods journals are members and regularly attend the annual meeting. Hoffman is one of the youngest presidents ever to be elected.

Additionally, Iowa will host SMEP in 2023, which will be the meeting where Hoffman gives her presidential address.

Hoffman joined the College of Education in the Department of Psychological and Quantitative Foundations in January 2019 after previous faculty positions at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and the University of Kansas.

Her research seeks to empirically examine and to thoughtfully disseminate how developments in quantitative methodology can best be utilized to advance empirical work in the social sciences, with particular focus on the real-world behavior of longitudinal models, multilevel models, and structural equation models.

Hoffman teaches graduate courses and intensive workshops on advanced quantitative methods, such as latent trait measurement and structural equation models, longitudinal models, multilevel models, and generalized linear models.

She was elected to the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology in 2009 and received its Early Career Award in 2011. Hoffman is the author of the 2015 textbook, “Longitudinal Analysis: Modeling Within-Person Fluctuation and Change” (Routledge).