Howard Wainer

Dr. Wainer received his Ph. D. from Princeton University in 1968. After serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago, a period at the Bureau of Social Science Research during the Carter Administration, 21 years as Principal Research Scientist in the Research Statistics Group at Educational Testing Service, 15 years as Distinguished Research Scientist at the National Board of Medical Examiners and Emeritus Professor (adjunct) of Statistics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is now in his post-employment career living in the Princeton area of New Jersey.

Dr. Wainer has a long-standing interest in the use of graphical methods for data analysis and communication, robust statistical methodology, and the development and application of generalizations of item response theory. His most recent books include: Uneducated Guesses, (Princeton University Press, 2011) A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed with Lawrence Hubert (Chapman & Hall, 2012), Medical Illuminations (Oxford University Press, 2013) and ‪ Truth or Truthiness: Distinguishing Fact from Fiction by Learning to Think like a Data Scientist (Cambridge University Press, 2016) which was named by the Financial Times as one of the top 6 books of 2016. In 2021, in collaboration with Michael Friendly he pubished "A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication" (Harvard University Press) which has since been republished in Chinese and Japanese with a Russian version to appear soon. In 2024, jointly with Haberman, Sinharay & Feinberg, he published "Subscores: A Practical Guide for Their Producers and Consumers" (Cambridge University Press), and his latest book, with Dan Robinson, "Testing and the Paradoxes of Fairness" will be appearing in October, 2025 (also with Cambridge University Press).

Dr. Wainer was elected a Fellow in the American Statistical Association in 1985 and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association in 2009. He was awarded the Educational Testing Service's Senior Scientist Award in 1990. He received the 2006 National Council on Measurement in Education Award for Scientific Contribution to a Field of Educational Measurement for his development of Testlet Response Theory and given NCME's career achievement award in 2007, and he received the Samuel J. Messick Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from Division 5 of the American Psychological Association in 2009 and was included in Who's Who in America, 2009 - 2021 and Who's Who in the World, 2010-2021. In 2013 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Psychometric Society and in 2021 he rerceived the American Statistical Association's prestigious Statistical Computing and Graphics Award.

He was the editor of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics from 2002 until 2004 and was on the editorial board of Psychological Methods and is a former Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Applied Psychological Measurement as well as a former Treasurer of the Psychometric Society. Since 1990 he has written a popular column on data visualization in the statistics magazine Chance.