Dr. Joseph L. Rodgers

Lois Autrey Betts Chair in Psychology and Human Development

Joe Rodgers is a Quantitative Psychologist and past director of the Quantitative Methods program in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt;  he began his work at Vanderbilt in August, 2012.  He retired from the University of Oklahoma in summer, 2012, after 31 years of service on the faculty; at OU he is George Lynn Cross Research Professor Emeritus and Robert Glenn Rapp Foundation Presidential Professor.  He received his Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from UNC in 1981, with a minor in Biostatistics.  He has held visiting positions at Ohio State, University of Hawaii, UNC, Duke, University of Southern Denmark, and University of Pennsylvania.  His research team has been continuously funded by NIH since 1987 to develop mathematical models of adolescent intellectual development, young adult fertility, and family/friendship interactions.  His methodological interests include mathematical modeling, resampling theory, quasi-experimental design, exploratory data analysis, and multidimensional scaling.  He was the editor of the applied methods journal Multivariate Behavioral Research from 2006 to 2011, and is a past-president of the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology, the Society for the Study of Social Biology, and two of APA’s divisions, Population and Environmental Psychology, and Quantitative and Qualitative Methods.  He is a fellow of APA, APS, and AAAS.  His wife Jacci is an Associate Dean of Peabody College at Vanderbilt, and a former chair of Accounting at Oklahoma City University.  They have two young adult daughters;  Rachel works for an international development company in DC, and Naomi is a Ph.D. student in Geology at USC in Los Angeles.