UCLA education professor Li Cai has won an Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences.
The award recognizes researchers who have made great strides in the sciences of mind, brain and behavior with outstanding work within the first 10 years of their post-doctoral career. Cai was nominated for the award by the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology for his work on the development, estimation, integration and evaluation of innovative latent variable models.
Cai is a professor of education at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing. He is also affiliated with the department of psychology. his research involves the development, integration, and evaluation of innovative latent variable models that have wide-ranging applications in educational, psychological, and health-related domains of study. He has collaborated with researchers at UCLA and elsewhere on projects examining measurement issues in mental health, substance abuse treatment and patient-reported outcomes research.
In 2012, President Obama named Cai a Presidential Early Career Scientist, based on his early contributions to improved measurement methods, particularly in the area of statistical computing.
Cai earned a B.A. from Nanjing University and a doctorate in quantitative psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.