Daniel McNeish, who graduated with his doctorate degree from the University of Maryland in 2015, was given the American Psychological Association’s Anne Anastasi Dissertation Award.
Receiving the award this year was especially surprising and rewarding for Dr. McNeish: applicants are eligible for the award up to three years after finishing dissertation work, and this was the last year he qualified to receive the distinction.
Dr. McNeish’s research focuses on statistical methods for challenging data structures, those involving small sample sizes in particular. His article based on his research was published in Multivariate Behavioral Research, a leading statistical research journal, co-authored by COE Prof. Laura Stapleton, and was the most read paper in the 2016 volume year based on the journal’s reported metrics.
Along with Dr. Stapleton, Dr. McNeish worked with COE professors Gregory R. Hancock and Jeffrey R. Haring, as well as collaborating on projects with COE faculty Kathy Wentzel and Rebecca Silverman. He also worked on his research with Denis Dumas, a former educational psychology graduate student who is now a professor at the University of Denver.
He had entered the competition in previous years but had not been selected for the award.
“I’m definitely humbled to be included in the list of recipients of the award considering that many of the world’s preeminent quantitative psychologists have won the award in previous years. I am glad that the EDMS program is receiving recognition for the talented students it continually produces year after year,” he said.
Dr. McNeish has been teaching at Arizona State University since August 2017 after stops at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Currently, he teaches a graduate course on models for clustered data and has continued the lines of statistical research he started at UMD.
