Patrick J. Curran
Patrick James Curran (born May 9, 1965) is an American statistician and professor of quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina, where he is also a faculty member at the Center for Developmental Science. He is the coauthor of "Latent Curve Models: A Structural Equation Perspective" (with Ken Bollen) and is known broadly in the social sciences for teaching and research on the measurement and analysis of longitudinal data. He is co-host, along with Gregory R. Hancock, of "Quantitude", a podcast focusing on quantitative methodology. Career. Curran earned a bachelor's degree magna cum laude  from the University of Colorado Boulder in 1987 and a PhD in clinical psychology with an emphasis in quantitative methodology from Arizona State University in 1994. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in applied statistics at the University of California, Los Angeles under Bengt O. Muthén, the creator of the Mplus statistical program. He became an assistant professor of psychology at Duke University in 1996. He moved three years later to UNC, where he was promoted to associate professor in 2002 and full professor in 2006. He was Director of the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory from 2010 to 2017. Extramural  service. Curran serves on the editorial boards or as a consulting editor of several prominent journals in the field of psychology, including "Multivariate Behavioral Research" and "Journal of Abnormal Psychology". In 2008, he cofounded Curran–Bauer Analytics, a consulting firm based in Durham, North Carolina. He has taught doctoral-level quantitative workshops to more than 1,000 students and research scientists across six countries. Research. Curran's program of methodological research encompasses structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and latent growth curve modeling of longitudinal data. In addition, as a principal investigator on several grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse , he conducts applied research in developmental psychopathology in general and on the risk factors of adolescent substance use in particular. He has published extensively in books and peer-reviewed journals and has been cited in the scholarly literature more than 40,000 times.