September 1, 2021
Young to serve as OIRA fellow in 2021-2022 academic year
Submitted by Office of Institutional Research and Assessment
Michael Young, professor of psychological sciences, will serve as a research fellow at the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment during the 2021-2022 academic year.
As a fellow, Young will join forces with the office staff and help with training department heads across campus on PowerBI tools and reports developed with the office and serve as an advisor to the developer team by bringing information back to the team from these department head interactions. He will also help develop statistical modeling and visualizations, along with other areas of interest, such as data mining and machine learning. Young's involvement with the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment team and projects and his longtime experience as a faculty member and department head will undoubtedly strengthen the communications and connections between the team and data users around campuses.
Young began his career as a computer scientist in 1984 with a specialization in machine learning, received his doctorate in psychology in 1995, and joined Kansas State University in 2012 as head of the psychological sciences department, a role in which he served for nine years. He received the K-State Presidential Award for Outstanding Department Head in 2020.
His primary research program involves the study of decision-making in dynamic environments. Young continues to integrate his background in computer science with his interest in psychology through the development of computational models of environment-behavior relations, the use of video games to collect behavioral data, and advancing psychology's use of the latest statistical and design methods through his publications, workshops and conference presentations.
He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society, and recently served as board chair for the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology.
The Office of Institutional Research and Assessment was formally established in October 2019 by combining the former offices of Planning and Analysis, and Assessment, and is currently comprised of two primary functional teams: Reporting and Analytics and Assessment of Student Learning.
For more information about the services provided by the Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, please visit its website.