Carolyn Anderson (Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1993) is Professor Emerita in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with additional affiliations in the Departments of Psychology and Statistics. Her research is situated at the intersection of multivariate models for categorical data and psychometrics.

Dr. Anderson has developed and studied alternative formulations of item response models grounded in statistical graphical models. These models, which are special cases of loglinear models, serve as formative measurement models. She has proposed estimation methods for these models that leverage standard estimation techniques, enabling the estimation of complex models with greater flexibility.

She has published extensively on this topic in leading journals in the field, and her work is both relevant and foundational to ongoing research in this area. In addition, Dr. Anderson has contributed to the literature on social networks, longitudinal data, and multilevel models. She is an active collaborator, working on both methodological research and applied projects with colleagues across educational psychology, psychology, computer science, and electrical and computer engineering.