Christopher Desjardins
Christopher Desjardins is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of
Educational Psychology in the Quantitative Methods in Education track with a focus on statistics. Christopher's research interests include Bayesian approaches to multilevel and latent modeling. His personal blog narrating his research can be found here.
For his MITER research, Christopher has been collaborating with faculty in the Institute of Child Development and Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) to examine variation in achievement and suspensions, longitudinally, with a focus on homeless and highly mobile (HHM) students. He has also been working with MPS on a housing intervention that provides HHM students with long-term, stable housing. He has specifically been involved in examining the effect of the intervention on achievement, suspensions, and attendance. In addition, he has been involved in an executive functioning (EF) intervention aimed at bolstering EF in HHM students. He presently has three manuscripts in prep for these projects and two of these should be submitted by the end of the summer 2010. Christopher holds a B.S. in biology from the University of Maine and has held several different field ecology positions. In addition, Christopher has studied ecology at the University of Alberta. Christopher is also pursuing a MS in Statistics at the University of Minnesota.
The profile analysis package for R implementing the routines described in Davison & Davenport (2002) is available here.
To install the package run:
install.packages("profanal_1.0.tar.gz",type="source")
Selected Publications
Masten, A. S., Desjardins, C. D., McCormick, C. M., Kuo, S. I., & Long, J. D. (In Press). The significance of childhood competence for adult success in work: A developmental cascade analysis. Development and Psychopathology.
Liou, P-Y., Desjardins, C. D., & Lawrenz, F. (2010). Influence of scholarships on STEM teach-ers: Cluster analysis and characteristics. School Science and Mathematics, 110(3), 115-130.
Masten, A. S., Long, J. D., Kuo, S. I., McCormick, C. M, & Desjardins, C. D.. (2009). Developmental models of strategic intervention. European Journal of Developmental Science, 3, 282-291.
Selected Presentations
Masten, A. S., Desjardins, C. D., McCormick, C. M., Kuo, S. I.-C., & Long, J. D. (2010, March). The significance of childhood competence for adult success in work: A developmental cascade analysis. Paper presented at the 2010 meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence in Philadelphia, PA.
Desjardins, C. D., Chung, C.-T., & Long, J. (2010, February). Exploring delinquency in high risk students using longitudinal zero-inflated Poisson Bayesian multilevel models. Poster presented at the 2010 Graduate Student Research Days, Minneapolis, MN.
June 2010