Dr. Charles Driver

After a late start to student life, studying psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia, and an influential period in Amsterdam with Prof. Denny Borsboom, I completed a PhD at the Max Planck for Human Development in Berlin. This was with the guidance of Prof. Manuel Voelkle, and led me in the direction of dynamic systems modelling, software development, and the general complexity of psychological measurement and change over time. Maintenance, development, and applications of the ctsem (continuous-time structural equation modelling) software continued post-PhD, with a deviation into the item response theory field for which I also developed the bigIRT software. The bigIRT project was to support, and make use of data from, the the large scale online learning software 'Mindsteps', as a part of my move to the University of Zurich. I am broadly fascinated by the difficulties of understanding psychological phenomena with quantitative data, which led me to join the Psychological Methodology, Evaluation and Statistics team at the beginning of 2024.

My current research projects cover the following topics:

Modelling psychological phenomena as dynamic systems.
IRT with large amounts of data.
Improved approaches to model fit assessment.