Psychometric Society Career Award for Willem Heiser
Willem Heiser receives the 2017 Psychometric Society Career Award for Lifetime Achievement. 'Receiving this prize from my colleagues makes me very happy.' Heiser is professor emeritus in Psychology, Methodology and Statistics at the Leiden Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences and professor of Data Theory at the Mathematical Institute of the Faculty of Science.
Lifetime membership
Heiser will receive a commemorative plaque, a monetary prize of $500, free lifetime membership of the Psychometric Society, and an invitation to give a presentation a keynote lecture at the 2017 International Meeting of the Psychometric Society (IMPS 2017) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Heiser became a member of the society in 1974 and has served the society in many ways. Among many other contributions he was the president of the society in 2003-2004 and he was the chief editor of the main journal of the society, Psychometrika, from 1995 till 1999.
Heiser: 'This prize makes me very happy'
'I was proud to receive a royal honour. But this prize is more important to me because it is the recognition that my own colleagues value my scientific contribution.'
Dutch-Belgian cooperation in Graduate School
All PhD students in Psychometrics in Belgium and the Netherlands are brought together in the Interuniversity Graduate School of Psychometrics and Sociometrics (IOPS) of which Willem Heiser was Scientific director from 2006 through 2014. In 2013 Heiser submitted an application for funding in the Dutch NWO Graduate Programme. Then it was the turn of the master’s students in Applied Statistics to try and earn one quarter of the € 800,000 subsidy.
(Photo banner: Valedictory Symposium for Willem J. Heiser 'Best Practices in Statistical Data Analysis', Academy Building, Leiden 2014.)
Psychometric Society
The psychometric society was founded in 1935 and has been devoted to the development of psychology as a quantitative rational science. The 2017 Psychometric Society Career Award honors individuals whose publications, presentations, and professional activities over a career have had a widespread positive impact on the field of psychometrics. These contributions may include important theoretical or methodological developments, applications of psychometric theory and methods that have influenced substantive research in psychology, educational measurement or related fields, or innovative ideas that have significantly affected psychometric practices.