Valen Johnson
University Distinguished Professor
Department Head of Statistics

Since the fall of 2012, I have been a professor in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University, where I currently serve as Department Head.  Before this, I was a Professor of Biostatistics at both the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (2004-2012) and the University Michigan (2002-2004).  And before that I was a Professor of Statistics at Duke University (1989-2001) and worked for one year at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2001-2002).   I received my Ph.D. in statistics from The University of Chicago in 1989. My applied research interests include educational assessment, ordinal data and rank data analysis, clinical trial design, image analysis, and reliability analysis.  My current methodological interests focus on Bayesian hypothesis testing and its connections to classical testing procedures, Bayesian variable selection, Markov chain Monte Carlo model diagnostics, and latent variable modeling.  A few recent papers on these topics are listed below.

Selected recent publications:

- Retiring significance: raise the bar (2019) Nature 28 March 2019, Vol 567, 461.
- Evidence from marginally significant t statistics (2019), The American Statistician, 73(S1), 129-134.
- Redefine Statistical Significance (2017), Benjamin* D. J., Berger J. O., Johannesson* M., Nosek B. A., Wagenmakers E.J., Berk R., Bollen K. A., Brembs B., Brown L., Camerer C., Cesarini D., Chambers C. D., Clyde M., Cook T. D., De Boeck P., Dienes Z., Dreber A., Easwaran K., Efferson C., Fehr E., Fidler F., Field A. P., Forster M., George E. I., Gonzalez R., Goodman S., Green E., Green D. P., Greenwald A., Hadfield J. D., Hedges L. V., Held L., Ho T.H., Hoijtink H., Jones J. H., Hruschka D. J., Imai K., Imbens G., Ioannidis J. P. A., Jeon M., Kirchler M., Laibson D., List J., Little R., Lupia A., Machery E., Maxwell S. E., McCarthy M., Moore D., Morgan S. L., Munafo M., Nakagawa S., Nyhan B., Parker T. H., Pericchi L., Perugini M., Rouder J., Rousseau J., Savalei V., Schonbrodt F. D., Sellke T., Sinclair B., Tingley D., Van Zandt T., Vazire S., Watts D. J., Winship C., Wolpert R. L., Xie Y., Young C., Zinman J., Johnson* V. E. (senior and corresponding* author) Nature Human Behaviour,in press.
- On the reproducibility of psychological science (2017) with R. Payne, T. Wang, S. Mandal, A. Asher, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 112(517), 1-10.
- Restricted most powerful Bayesian tests for linear models (2016) with S. Goddard Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 43(4), 1162-1177.
- Bayes factors (2016) Encyclopedia of Life Sciences.
- Joint Bayesian modeling of binomial and rank data for primage cognition (2015), with B. Barney, F. Amici, F. Aureli, J. Call, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 110(510), 573-582.
- Revised Standards for Statistical Evidence (2013), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(48), 19313-19317.
- Uniformly most powerful Bayesian tests (2013), Annals of Statistics, 41(4), 1716-1741
- On numerical aspects of Bayesian variable selection (2013), Bayesian Analysis, 8(4), 741-758
- Bayesian variable selection in high-dimensional settings (2012), with David Rossell, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 107, 649-660.
On the use of non-local prior densities for default Bayesian hypothesis tests (2010), with David Rossell, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, 72, 143-170.

Books:

Grade Inflation (2003), Springer
Ordinal Data Modeling (1999), with James Albert, Springer-Verlag.

A more complete listing of my publications can be found here

or at Google Scholar