Richard Landers

Richard N. Landers, Ph.D., is the John P. Campbell Distinguished Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is Principal Investigator for TNTLAB (Testing New Technologies in Learning, Assessment and Behavior), where his research concerns the use of innovative technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, games, and gamification to improve psychometric assessment, employee selection, adult learning and development, and research methods.  He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, American Psychological Association, and Association for Psychological Science.

He is also currently Principal Investigator of a $2M grant from the United States Office of Naval Research exploring the use of large language models to facilitate leadership coaching. For that project, he leads an interdisciplinary team of 12 employees and volunteers and has developed a production-grade internet-delivered platform currently being refined and tested both at the University of Minnesota and at the United States Naval Academy. Key to this research is its blend of computer science and social science to better achieve authentic innovation in the development of human cognition and performance, beyond what research from either field can do alone.

His published work appears primarily in psychology journals, such as American Psychologist, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Business and Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology Perspectives, and Psychological Methods, and in interdisciplinary human-computer interaction outlets, including Computers in Human Behavior, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies and Simulation & Gaming.  He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Technology, Mind, and Behavior, the only open access journal of the American Psychological Association. He is also author of a statistics textbook and a research methods textbook, and he has developed two edited scholarly volumes, most recently the Cambridge Handbook of Technology and Employee Behavior. 

Dr. Landers maintains connections with industry, the media, and I-O practitioners.  He is featured frequently in the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business Insider, and Popular Science, and he regularly consults with industry as president of Landers Workforce Science LLC (https://landers.tech), primarily by providing scientific evaluations of employee hiring systems incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning, to support both their validity and their legality.