Timo von Oertzen

 Dr. von Oertzen is Assistant Professor of Quantitative Psychology, head of the Mathematical Psychology Laboratory, PI of the Onyx Graphical SEM Software project, member of the OpenMx SEM Software developer team, and faculty of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE), and faculty of the Quantitative Psychology Area at the University of Virginia Department of Psychology.

Dr. von Oertzen currently advises three doctoral students: Bommae Kim, Daniel Martin, and Siny Tsang.

Recent collaborators include Ulman Lindenberger, Steven Boker, Christopher Hertzog, Jack McArdle, John R. Nesselroade, Andreas Brandmaier, Julian Karch, Markus Werkle-Bergner, Manuel Völkle, Paolo Ghisletta, Manuel Bodirsky, Michael Neale, and Michael Kubovy.

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interest

Amazing amounts of money is spent to collect data in multiple studies around the world. Dr. von Oertzens research goal is to optimize the translation of these resources into scientific information. He applies to avenues to this aim: (1) Developing methods to optimize study designs such that the resulting data contains a maximum of information about the research questions posed, and (2) extract a maximum of information from existing data. For the first aim, Dr. von Oertzen developed the framework of power equivalence, which describes that two study designs provide identical power for a given research question. The theory of power equivalence describes model transformations that allow to transform models power-equivalently, while optimizing resources spend in these design. For the second aim, Dr. von Oertzen researchers methods used in data analyses and co-designs two free Structural Equation Model software systems. The first one, Onyx, is a graphical SEM software designed for small to medium sized SEM that allows easy access and is optimal for teaching data analysis. The second, OpenMx, is an open-software R package to estimate SEM. OpenMx is specifically designed for complex and large models, with support for multi-core or multi-computer parallel estimation. Dr. von Oertzen is also interested in the use of clustering and classification, specifically for inference statistic.

Timo von Oertzen
Department of Psychology
University of Virginia
Millmont Room 130
Charlottesville, VA 22903
OFFICE: +1 434 982 4472, CELL: +1 434 466 8277
e-mail: timo@virginia.edu