Donald Hedeker, PhD, Professor of Public Health Sciences, has been given the 2022 Sells Award for Distinguished Multivariate Research from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP). The award is given annually to recognize an individual who has made distinguished lifetime achievement in multivariate experimental psychology, and is the highest honor bestowed by the Society in recognition of contributions to the field.
Hedeker is a biostatistician whose chief expertise is developing and using advanced statistical methods for clustered and longitudinal data, with particular emphasis on mixed-effects models. He is the primary author of several computer programs for mixed-effects analysis. More recently, he has developed methods and software for analysis of intensive longitudinal data, which are data with many measurements over time, often collected using mobile devices and/or the internet. Such data are increasingly obtained by researchers in many research areas, for example in the areas of mobile health (mHealth) and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies.
Hedeker is also an associate editor for the journal Statistics in Medicine, and co-author of the textbook “Longitudinal Data Analysis,” published by Wiley in 2006.
“This is a great honor, especially since I first learned about multivariate statistics from R. Darrell Bock, a past recipient of this award, as a graduate student here at the University of Chicago in the 1980s,” Hedeker said.
The Sells Award is named for Saul B. Sells, a founder and early President of SMEP. The Society was founded in 1960 as a small elective society of researchers interested in multivariate quantitative methods and their application to substantive problems in psychology and related fields. Past recipients of the award are listed on the SMEP website.
Hedeker will receive an honorarium and deliver an address at the next meeting of SMEP, scheduled for October 2023 in Iowa City, Iowa.