As head of the Competence Center for Empirical Research Methods at WU and WU's in-house statistical consultant, I am concerned with matters of data analysis and the transfer and application of statistical methods to social and behavioral sciences with a focus on business research and youth mental health. In this line of work, I support faculty and graduate students in the correct usage of statistical methodology for answering their research questions and aim at the dissemination of modern statistical procedures into substantive areas.

Additionally, I conduct original statistical research which currently focuses on data analysis, applied statistics and computational statistics. In this work my main motivation is to help improve various aspects of modern, state-of-the-art data analysis, particularly in the following areas:

• Discrete Data Analysis: count data, categorical data, mixed data types
• Data Mining and Statistical Learning: tree models, graphical models, clustering, segmentation
• Exploratory Data Analysis and Data Visualization: multidimensional scaling, proximity scaling, multivariate visualization
• Multivariate Statistics: chain graph models, clustering, segmentation, association and scaling of variables
• Natural Language Processing: text mining, topic modeling, visualization
• Psychometrics: IRT in behavioral and social sciences and business, IRT models for longitudinal data and measurement of change, multidimensional and optimal scaling
• Statistical Software: R, Python