Leo Alexander III
Lecturer
Leo joined the School in Fall 2022. He is completing a doctorate degree from Rice University. He holds a master’s degree from Rice, and a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Sacramento.
His research focuses on how advances in technology, such as machine learning, big data, and web-based technologies, are affecting psychological testing, quantitative research methodology, and personnel selection. He is particularly interested in how advances in technology may be used to increase fairness and diversity in employee recruitment and selection. He is currently investigating the effect of sourcing algorithms used to deliver online job ads to potential job applicants on hiring decisions. In addition, he is working on a research project that uses signal detection theory to measure the performance of people charged with detecting adverse impact in hiring decisions.
View his profile here.
Katie Regan
Office Support Specialist
Katie joined the School in December 2021. Prior to her time at LER, she was an Office Support Associate in Molecular & Cellular Biology on campus.
She serves as the Office Support Specialist for the School of Labor and Employment Relations. She provides support for the Assistant Dean of Student Services with the admissions process, new student orientation, scheduling, and graduation. She also provides support for the LER faculty, staff, and students with a variety of other tasks.
View her profile here.
Augustus Wood
Assistant Professor
Augustus is a scholar of African American History of the Urban South with an interdisciplinary focus on political economy, intra-racial class struggle, working class social movements, and gentrification in modern urban regions. He also centralizes the role of labor struggles in anti-Black working-class racial oppression and the development of internal neo-colonialism. His other research includes Black Power in Southern Cities, Black Marxism in History, and Black Radicalism in labor social movements.
He holds a doctorate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s degree from Clark Atlanta University, and a bachelor’s degree from Morehouse College. He teaches several programs in the Labor Education Program, including Introduction to Labor Studies, Contemporary Labor Problems, Labor History, and Gender, Race, Class, and Work.
View his profile here.
Bo Zhang
Assistant Professor
Bo joined LER in Fall 2022. He completed doctorate and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Beijing Normal University.
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.
View his profile here.