Currently:
PhD Candidate at Penn State in Human Development and Family Studies (Quantitative Emphasis)
My name is Jonathan Park. I obtained my BA in Psychology and my MA in Experimental Psychology with an emphasis in Quantitative Psychology from the California State University at Fullerton (CSUF) with a focus in Item Response Theory, test equating, and longitudinal SEM.
Currently, I am in my final year as a PhD candidate at Penn State where I conduct work on both discrete- and continuous-time dynamic network models. Some of my work here has focused on the rammifications of modeling (non-)directional relations in contemporaneous realtions while other parts of my work pertain to model fitting in continuous-time dynamic networks via data-driven methods. Another vein of my work pertains to community detection and conceptualizing how our models don't necessarily fit the extant literature. I have a forthcoming book chapter where I implement fuzzy community detection methods to address the idea of "fuzzy" people: individuals whose group membership is ambiguous or whose dynamics are largely described by person-specific dynamics without respect to a group. The broad hope of this research is to better separate the individual from the group when necessary whilst also being able to derive sound inference on group-level dynamics that may be present in large samples of individual time-series.
My research throughout my MA pertained to establishing metric equivalence across longitudinal timeframes using Item Response Theory (IRT) equating paradigms (i.e., the Haebara method), explicitly modeling the effects of negatively worded items in personality assessments (i.e., the NEO-PI-R), and longitudinal modeling of dyadic interactions using data gathered from the Fullerton Longitudinal Study.
In my other research, I studied dynamical interactions of dyadic pairs using novel statistical methods (i.e., dynamical correlation). I have also developed an algorithm that constructs optimal scales using an iterative search procedure under the IRT framework.
I am a work-aholic. I enjoy coding in my free time and have made data mining algorithms for mining social data off of twitter, instagram, and reddit and compiled the code into R. I also recently made it to the front page of Reddit for a project I did visualizing my social networks in both Facebook and Instagram!
I have a loving dog, Sunshine. He is a log bigger than the photo I have posted (see below) and weighs about 4-times as much as he did when it was taken.
