Psychometrics Institute

Professor Murray Aitkin

Dr Murray Aitkin [BSc DSc PhD Syd] is a Professorial Fellow in the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne. His PhD in statistics at the University of Sydney was followed by postdoctoral work at the Psychometric Laboratory, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has held chairs of statistics at Lancaster, where he was foundation Director of the Centre for Applied Statistics, and at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Tel Aviv, and research chairs in Australia and the UK. He has held several visiting research posts at the Educational Testing Service, and has been a senior statistics consultant to the US National Center for Education Statistics since 2000, initially as Chief Statistician for the Education Statistics Services Institute of the American Institutes for Research, and subsequently as an adviser on statistical issues in the National Assessment of Educational Progress. He is well known in the psychometric field for his 1981 foundational Psychometrika paper with Darrell Bock on the EM algorithm for item response models. His interests are wide, spanning psychometrics, social and medical statistics, statistical computing and foundational theories of statistical inference.