Will Shadish is Professor and Founding Faculty in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at the University of California, Merced, scheduled for a full opening in Fall, 2005.
A personal message to students:
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I was raised in the Army as my father traveled from base to base. I never lived anywhere for more than 2-3 years before I went to graduate school. My family settled in Redding, California, in 1966 when my father retired from the Army, and I graduated from Shasta High School in 1967. So my family has been in the Central Valley for about 40 years, and I consider it home.
I went to Santa Clara University for my undergraduate work in sociology, finishing in 1972 after a stint in the Army myself. I applied and was accepted to graduate school in education at Stanford, in sociology at Chicago, and in law at UCLA. Clearly I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. So I turned down all those offers, and took a year off, painting houses and working on an organic farm at Esalen. I finally decided to go to graduate school in clinical psychology at Purdue, where I received my doctorate in 1978. Next, a chance to work with Donald Campbell took me to a postdoctoral fellowship in methodology and program evaluation at Northwestern for the next three years. In 1981, I took a faculty position at the University of Memphis, and stayed there for 22 years until I came to UC Merced in 2003. Like nearly all of us who came to UC Merced, I am excited about helping to build the first new major research university of the 21 st century. It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I feel lucky to be here (and to return to my family in the Central Valley).
My research interests are in experimental and quasi-experimental design for field research, meta-analysis (both methodology and application), and evaluation theory. I enjoy teaching both undergraduates and graduate students in all these areas—especially skeptical undergraduates who think statistics is something too hard for them. And perhaps the most personally rewarding part of university life for me has been mentoring my many graduate students through their doctoral degrees, and then remaining friends and colleagues over the subsequent years.
My interests outside the university are in hiking (I've hiked the Himalaya, the Alps, the Pyrenees, the Sierra Nevada in both the US and Spain, and many more places), cooking gourmet food, running, and travel in general.
UC Merced is going to be a great university. I hope you'll consider joining us to share in our excitement.
Please visit my website at: