J. Arthur Woodward
J. Arthur Woodward came to U.C. Merced from the University of California, Los Angeles. He served the UCLA community as a teacher, researcher, and academic leader for more than twenty five years. During an eleven-year stint as chair of the UCLA Department of Psychology -- one of the largest programs on the campus, with more than 65 faculty, 200 graduate students, and over 2,500 undergraduate majors -- Woodward played a key role in helping to achieve its current ranking, which is among the top four psychology programs in the country. While he was chair, more than thirty new psychology faculty were recruited and he initiated departmental fundraising efforts to further support academic programs. In 2002 he received the Psychology Department's Distinguished Service Award.
He teaches statistics, experimental design, and psychometric theory. To augment his classes, he has developed statistical instructional software and published a graduate textbook on statistics and experimental design. He established a series of departmental seminars to teach graduate students about the art of obtaining extramural funding, and currently more than half of the National Science Foundation Fellowships in the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences now are in Psychology. He worked to upgrade departmental undergraduate teaching facilities by creating four computerized classrooms with more than 100 high-end workstations, and six undergraduate study areas around the Psychology Department complex. For his contributions to teaching, in both the classroom and the laboratory, Woodward received the first Department of Psychology Distinguished Teaching Award in 1996.
Woodward's research ranges from mathematical and statistical aspects of psychological measurement theory to statistical genetics; and from applied cognitive psychology to technology transfer focused on early mathematics education. His research has been supported by an unbroken chain of extramural grants that began in the late 70s and continues to this the present. Practical applications of his work have included estimating the number of heroin addicts in the United States, analyzing the processes of verbal memory storage and retrieval, and studying genetic and environmental influences in complex mental illness. In recent years his primary research has focused on the search for prenatal factors that increase risk for schizophrenia as well as on development of multimedia approaches for teaching quantitative concepts and skills to young children. Earlier in his career he received the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award for Early Career Contributions. In the year 2000, Woodward was chosen “Professor of the Year” in the College of Letters and Sciences at UCLA.