Education

PhD, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2020
MS, Applied Statistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2020
MS, Psychological Measurement, Beijing Normal University, 2015
BS, Psychology, Beijing Normal University, 2012

Research Interests

Personnel selection (e.g., applicant faking, forced-choice measurement)
Personality (e.g., personality assessment, relationships of Big 5 with stress, health, and workplace outcomes)
Research methods (e.g., IRT, SEM, bifactor models, longitudinal analysis)

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on personnel selection and organizational research methods. Specifically, he focuses on how to improve personality assessment to increase the effectiveness of personnel selection. He is interested in understanding how job applicants respond to personality items, how to prevent faking using the forced-choice format, and how to detect and correct for faking using advanced statistic models. He has a strong interest in developing new statistical methods to aid with personnel selection research and has developed augmented bifactor models to enable more stable estimation of the validity of hierarchical constructs. These include the Mixture Dominance Unfolding Model to study heterogeneity in item response process, the Generalized Thurstonian Unfolding Model to score forced-choice data, and the Unfolding Item Response Tree Model to account for unfolding response process and response styles simultaneously. Finally, Dr. Zhang is interested in personality change and how personality is related to stress and health.