Meet Our Experts

Cindy Hill is a Principal Industrial/Organizational Psychologist at ACT and has been a major contributor to ACT’s WorkKeys system. Dr. Hill conducts validation studies for the development and review of tests for hiring, certification and licensure.  This includes job analysis, the development of test content outlines, national surveys, data analysis, item writing and review, standard setting, and validating the test scores of off-the-shelf and company-specific tests. Her recent research has explored the alignment and “stacking” of credentials.

Chi-Yu Huang is a lead psychometrician in Applied Research at ACT, Inc. She has extensive experience in operational psychometric procedures for licensure and certification examinations, computerized-based testing, and data forensics analyses.

Yuchi Huang is a senior research scientist on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at ACT Inc. Prior to joining the team, Yuchi was a natural language processing (NLP) research scientist at Educational Testing Service. He earned his PhD in computer science from Rutgers University.  At ACT, Yuchi spearheads research on the use of machine learning/deep learning models in education research. His current areas of interest include automatic generation of multimodal educational resources, multimodal analytics for measurement of complex skills and competencies, and automatic photorealistic avatars generation for human-agent interaction.

Dongmei Li is a lead psychometrician at ACT specializing in scaling, equating, and growth modeling.

Xin Li is a lead psychometrician in Research and Psychometrics. Her research interests include computer adaptive testing, statistical modeling, and practical issues in testing. 

Ian MacMillan is a systems analyst in the Automated Content Generation group at ACT. His research interests include automatic item generation, data visualization, and natural language processing.

Patricia (Pat) Muenzen is a Director with the Credentialing and Career Services team. She conducts research to support professional workforce career development, professional licensure and certification programs, and has special expertise in practice analysis and competency profile development. 

Dana Murano is a Research Scientist in ACT's Center for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning. Her background is in Educational Psychology and her research focuses primarily on the development and assessment of social and emotional skills in students.

Sungjin Nam is a research scientist in Applied Research at ACT.  His research focuses on understanding and supporting students with behavioral and linguistic data. He has expertise in applied machine learning and natural language processing.

Edgar Sanchez is a lead research scientist in Applied Research at ACT. He specialized in quasiexperimental design usage and predictive modeling  in support of ACT's test preparation programs.

Bob Sanders is a Director of Research Resources. He has experience in education assessment operations and education technology solutions, and is known for championing new ideas and initiatives while ensuring the customer journey consistently reflects the utmost standards of service and quality. Bob is Co-Inventor of a US Patent for a system and method for automated evaluation system routing, combining best practices of human and automated scoring processes. 

Jeff Schiel, a lead research scientist on ACT’s applied research team, specializes in the design and methodology of surveys and survey sampling. He has held several positions at ACT, one of which was director of survey research. Prior to that, he led survey-related work at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Jeffrey Steedle is a lead psychometrician directing the team responsible for statistical analyses for the ACT test and guiding research studies related to maintaining measurement quality while making changes to the assessment program. Jeff holds advanced degrees in education, statistics, and educational psychology, and his research interests include assessment validation, psychometrics, and motivation on achievement tests.

Kristin Lansing-Stoeffler is a Senior Learning Solutions Designer in ACT’s Center for Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning. Her background is in student engagement and the innovative measurement of 21st century skills including Creative Thinking, Collaborative Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, and ICT.

Melinda Taylor is a principal solutions designer in Research and Psychometrics. She provides thought leadership to the organization around product and process enhancements in support of the strategic mission as well as guidance to cross-functional teams on implementation of changes.

Hongling Wang is a senior psychometrician in Research and Psychometrics.  He is the architect of ACT's data forensics system for Test Security.  He designed different procedures for detection of possible test collusions in examinee level, test center level, and cross-test center level.

Shichao Wang is a psychometrician in the Assessment Transformation department specializing in test equating and scaling and supports for automatic test assembly.

Linette Weimer is a Program Manager on the Industrial-Organizational (I-O) Psychology team in ACT’s Research department. She is responsible for coordinating a wide variety of activities involving client-related work conducted by I-O team members and is often the first contact for clients interested in services provided by the team. This work includes WorkKeys profiling training and Linette registers clients into training opportunities, facilitates the processing of agreements and billing, tracks clients’ distance learning activities, maintains training materials, as well as assists with special ACT research projects such as generating cross walks and standard setting.