Abigail T. Panter, Ph.D.

Dr. Abigail T. Panter (Wellesley College, 1985; New York University, 1989) is the Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a member of the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She develops instruments, research designs, and data-analytic strategies for applied research questions in health (e.g., HIV/AIDS, mental health, cancer) and education. Her publications are in measurement and survey development, data collection and sampling, analysis of large data sets, multivariate data modeling, program evaluation design, and individual differences.

She was the Principal Investigator of the Educational Diversity Project, a longitudinal national study of law students at 64 law schools in the U.S. studying the impact of race/ethnicity on educational diversity at the start of and during law school. She also conducts research related to design and online survey methodology, nested/multilevel data modeling, survey nonresponse estimation using psychometric methods, and instrument development in the areas of implicit racial attitudes, guilt/shame, personal intelligence, and everyday discrimination.

Dr. Panter’s teaching is in the area of quantitative methods, including graduate courses in research design, classical and modern approaches to instrument/survey design and test theory, structural equation modeling, and exploratory factor analysis. Dr. Panter has received teaching awards for her quantitative teaching, including 2003 American Psychological Association Jacob Cohen Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring and several university-wide teaching awards. 

She frequently consults with federal agencies and foundations on grant review, presents workshops on statistical modeling, research design, program evaluation, and professional development, serves on national advisory committees and editorial boards in social/personality psychology, measurement, and quantitative methods, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA). She is a member APA’s Council of Representatives and the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE®) Advisory Board.

Dr. Panter is associate editor of the APA journal, Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology. She has published several books on research design and quantitative methods including The Handbook of Ethics in Quantitative Methodology (2011), The APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology (three volumes; in press), The Sage Handbook of Methods in Social Psychology (2004) and volumes on program evaluation for HIV/AIDS multisite projects. She is currently co-editing the APA Dictionary of Statistics and Research Methods.