Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise
Psychometrics
Statistics
Survey Design
Software Engineering
Pharmaceutical Research

Professional Biography
Dr. Angel’s interests include psychometrics, cognitive aspects of question design and the question-answering process, self-generated validity, statistical methods used in social science research, computer algorithms, the design of programming languages, and the philosophy of science. In addition to a doctorate in Policy Research, Evaluation, and Measurement (PREM) from Penn’s GSE, Dr. Angel holds a graduate degree in computer science and has created analytic and statistical software for nuclear medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. He is currently manager of the Education Policy Division and the Quantitative Methods Division at Penn’s Graduate School of Education where he also teaches graduate courses in statistics. Dr. Angel maintains an active schedule both performing and teaching music.

Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Angel has used his background in psychometrics to research the relationship between personality and occupational stressors prevalent among North American musicians. As a musician himself, he is interested in understanding how personality characteristics relate to type of music played, instrument of choice, primary musical activity, parental support for musical activities, formal musical training, income, gender, age, career satisfaction, wellness, coping behaviors, and numerous other musician characteristics. Dr. Angel has collected data on a large and diverse sample of musicians using a web-based survey and he continues to mine this dataset.