Katerina Marcoulides

In keeping with the Minnesota tradition, Katerina Marcoulides, PhD, is helping to forge a new path in the realm of measurement and quantitative modeling of psychological phenomena. Marcoulides develops advanced modeling and data mining approaches to analyze complex psychological data, particularly that which is longitudinal, in order to demonstrate how those approaches can be used to explore substantive domains in psychology.

Marcoulides became interested in measurement and quantitative modeling through an undergraduate research experience in a cognitive psychology lab. The lab was trying to develop a new method to measure mindfulness, and given Marcoulides’s strong orientation toward math, she was asked to help. Eventually a graduate student in the lab told Marcoulides about the fact that there are graduate programs in which, “all you do is develop new methods for measuring things in various fields in psychology.” Fast forward to present day—Marcoulides is now an assistant professor in the Quantitative and Psychometric Methods area. 

Currently, Marcoulides is working on developing a measure for math ability in children with disabilities, with a goal to help teachers create coursework that is better tailored to those students’ needs. She is also collaborating with the Minnesota Population Center on an NIH-funded project to investigate associations among parenting, marginalization, and well-being during the pandemic. This research includes developing measures of marginalization related to race, gender, and sexual identity, as well as using structural equation modeling to identify mechanisms that link race, sexual identity, and marginalization to parental well-being. Additionally, Marcoulides has developed a number of meta-heuristic optimization algorithms to determine which items on a questionnaire are key indicators for a particular question of interest, thus allowing applied researchers to pare down a particular measure into a smaller number of questions, which is less cognitively taxing for respondents and more cost-effective for researchers. 

Marcoulides works closely with her graduate students, training them to continue developing and advancing new techniques and approaches. She and her students pay particular attention to the ways in which technology can be leveraged toward this goal, especially in meeting the challenge of analyzing large data sets. Marcoulides and those she trains are well poised to continue advancing the field in this domain, and their work will continue to keep Minnesota Psychology on the map for years to come.