Daniel J. Bauer

Daniel John Bauer (born June 29, 1973) is an American statistician, professor, and director of the quantitative psychology program at the University of North Carolina, where he is also on the faculty at the Center for Developmental Science. He is known for rigorous methodological work on latent variable models and is a proponent of integrative data analysis, a meta-analytic technique that pools raw data across multiple independent studies.

Career Bauer graduated from Trinity University in 1994 with a major in psychology, minors in mathematics and history, and a concentration in computer science. He was a research coordinator at the Baylor College of Medicine prior to graduate school.

He earned a PhD in developmental psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in applied statistics at UNC's Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, whereupon he joined the quantitative and developmental psychology faculty at North Carolina State University. He returned to UNC in 2004 as an assistant professor in the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory. In addition, during that year, he was elected to the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology and became a faculty associate at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, leading a group for multilevel latent variable models.

He was promoted to associate professor in 2008 and full professor in 2013.

Extramural service Bauer serves on the editorial boards of Psychological Assessment, Psychological Methods, and the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. He is an editor of or reviewer for dozens of other journals.

In 2008, he cofounded the Curran–Bauer Analytics consulting firm with Patrick Curran, a colleague in the Thurstone Lab, and has taught numerous doctoral-level workshops in quantitative methods to social scientists worldwide. He was recognized by UNC in 2016 "for exceptional teaching of post-baccalaureate students."

Research Bauer has published widely in factor analysis, multilevel modeling, latent growth curves, mixture models, latent class models, structural equation modeling, and item response theory. He has presented his work at numerous conferences and has been cited in the scholarly literature more than 10,000 times.

As the recipient of various grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, he conducts applied research in psychopathology and negative health behaviors such as adolescent substance use.

Selected publications