MEET OUR EXPERTS

Peter Baldwin is a principal measurement scientist in the Office of Research Strategy at NBME. He has been at NBME since 2007 and previously served in the role of senior measurement scientist. He has authored numerous research papers and book chapters in the areas of equating, standard setting, automatic item generation and natural language processing.

Prior to joining NBME, Peter was a senior research fellow for the Research, Educational Measurement & Psychometrics program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he had previously earned his doctorate.

The University of Massachusetts awarded him the Psychometric Fellowship in 2004. In 2015, Peter was awarded the Alicia Cascallar Award by the National Council on Measurement in Education.

Brian E. Clauser is the distinguished research scientist in the Office of Research Strategy at NBME. He received his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and has worked at NBME since 1992.

Brian has published more than 100 journal papers and book chapters on issues related to differential item functioning, performance assessment, automated scoring of complex assessments, standard setting, applications of generalizability theory, test validity and the history of educational measurement.

He is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and past editor of both the Journal of Educational Measurement and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) book series. He received the NCME Career Contribution award in 2018.

Monica M. Cuddy is a measurement scientist in the Office of Research Strategy at NBME. She has been at NBME for more than 20 years, serving in different operational and research-related roles over the course of her tenure. In her current position, she is responsible for leading innovative research and development projects in the fields of medical education and assessment. Her current work focuses on the assessment of health care teams and health systems science.

Monica’s research interests include test validity (both theory and practice), fairness in testing, the assessment of health care teams, medical regulation, and gendered processes within medical education and practice. Much of her research has focused on collecting and evaluating validity evidence for USMLE® score uses and interpretations. She has expertise in both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies and has published broadly in the fields of medical education and assessment. Her research appears in such outlets as Academic Medicine and Advances in Health Science Education.

Monica has served on various NBME committees including the Stemmler Fund Steering Committee and the Hubbard Award Committee. She has been an active member of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division I: Education in the Professions since 2001, serving in a wide range of capacities. Recently, she served as the Program Chair for the 2020 Annual Meeting, and she currently chairs the Communication Committee. In 2014, she won the Division I Best Paper by an Established Investigator Award.

Monica received her doctorate in sociology from the University of Delaware, where she studied the relationships between U.S. state medical board autonomy and physician discipline.

Richard A. Feinberg is a senior psychometrician at NBME, where he oversees examination development, scoring, reporting and operational research for various subspecialty medical boards and the USMLE®. He has also been teaching research methods as an adjunct professor since 2013 at various institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine’s School of Applied and Professional Psychology.

Richard has served on several NBME committees including the Stemmler Medical Education Research Fund and the planning committee for invitational research conferences on Timing Impact on Measurement in Education (2017) and Natural Language Processing in Assessment (2021).

He has received several awards and recognitions in the educational measurement field, including the AERA Division I Established Researcher Award (2017) and the NCME Jason Millman Promising Measurement Scholar Award (2018). He was a winner in the Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice Cover Graphic/Data Visualization Competition (2016–2019). In 2020, he co-edited a volume for the NCME book series entitled Integrating Timing Considerations to Improve Testing Practices.

Richard holds a doctorate in research methodology and evaluation from the University of Delaware. His research interests include score reporting, exam timing and improving communication through data visualizations.

Irina Grabovsky is a senior psychometrician in the Psychometrics and Data Analysis department at NBME. She works on a variety of NBME’s client examinations and the USMLE®. Most recently, she has been engaged with scoring the medical school Subject Examinations.

Irina received her master’s in mathematics from the University of Delaware and her doctorate in mathematics from the University of Utah. In psychometric research, her interests lie in problems of setting cut scores on certification examinations, practical issues in equating and test security, and investigating item parameter drift.

Polina Harik is a senior measurement scientist with more than 20 years of experience in automated scoring of complex performance tasks and application of statistical methods to performance-based assessments. Her scholarly contributions have focused on the area of applied psychometrics, generalizability analyses, and natural language processing (NLP) to evaluate and improve the quality of large-scale standardized examinations.

Polina’s current research interests lie at the intersection of NLP and automated scoring, which resulted in the development on an Intelligent Clinical Text Evaluator (INCITE) engine to process and score clinical text. She is currently leading a multi-disciplinary initiative to develop novel approaches to the assessment of clinical reasoning within the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE®).

Jerusha J. Henderek is the manager of psychometrics in the Psychometrics and Data Analysis department at NBME. She manages a team of psychometricians responsible for operational scoring and related analyses/research supporting various domestic and international medical education assessments. She also provides psychometric input on research initiatives, including those exploring the assessment of communication skills and applications of automated item generation. Her research primarily focuses on applied operational questions in the areas of certification and licensure testing, performance assessment, and assessment of non-cognitive constructs.

Jerusha holds a doctorate in assessment and measurement from James Madison University. Her dissertation focused on improving the measurement of non-cognitive constructs. She also received a master’s in psychological sciences with a concentration in quantitative psychology from James Madison University. Prior to joining NBME, she worked on projects supporting selection assessments and program evaluation at Marriott International, Inc. and K–12 education research at College Board.

Michael Jodoin is the senior vice president for Customer and Portfolio Management at NBME. He is accountable for the strategic and operational leadership for NBME’s portfolio of products and services and the customers and stakeholders that we serve. 

Michael works at the intersection of education, medicine, technology and assessment science, with the aim of driving innovation and collaboration to improve health care. He joined NBME in 2009 and has served in leadership capacities, including vice president of USMLE® and vice president of Psychometrics and Data Analysis. Prior to joining NBME, he held a variety of psychometric, development scientist and leadership positions at ETS.

Michael holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of Massachusetts and has presented and published in areas such as equating, technologically enhanced item formats and adaptive assessment design.  

Daniel Jurich serves as associate vice president, USMLE®. In this role, he leads and supports various validity, equity, and security initiatives that enhance the quality of USMLE for students, medical educators, clinicians and licensing authority members. In previous roles since joining the NBME in 2014, Daniel managed teams of talented psychometricians whose responsibilities included directing operational assessment activities and research in service of NBME’s mission to protect the health of the public.

His medical education research focuses on evaluating the validity of assessments used throughout the educational journey, including USMLE, in-training, and board certification examinations. He also has worked with various medical schools to assess the impact of curricular changes on student performance and help guide schools considering similar changes.

Daniel also conducts research with diverse teams to address practical measurement and medical education challenges. Within measurement science, his interests have led him to evaluate methods to improve the formative capabilities of assessments so stakeholders can more effectively tailor actions based on strengths and deficiencies. He has also published pedagogical illustrations of measurement techniques and on topics such as test security and exam timing.

Before joining NBME, Daniel was a Fellow at the Regents Research Fund, where he provided psychometric guidance to a state’s department of education and evaluated their test security methods and policies. He earned a doctorate in Assessment and Measurement at James Madison University in 2014.

Melissa Margolis is a senior measurement scientist at NBME. Over the past 25 years, her research has focused on test validity, assessment and instrument design, and performance-based assessment, including early developmental work on projects that subsequently were implemented into the USMLE® sequence as Step 2 Clinical Skills and the Step 3 computer-based patient management simulations.

Melissa has also done extensive work on the assessment of skills and behaviors, with particular focus on the domains of professionalism, teamwork, health systems science, and, most recently, novel approaches to assessing diagnostic and management reasoning. She also contributed significantly to the development of a novel workplace-based assessment system used to provide developmental feedback and inform progression decisions about pediatrics residents. Her extensive research contributions have resulted in more than 150 scholarly publications and professional conference presentations on a variety of medical education, assessment and measurement-related topics.

In addition to her research activities, Melissa has provided consulting services focused on evaluation and improvement of high-stakes assessments to the American College of Veterinary Preventive Medicine; the American Osteopathic Board of Orthopedic Surgeons; the College of Family Physicians of Canada; the Royal Colleges of Physicians, Radiologists, and Surgeons in the United Kingdom; and the National Medical Examination Center in China.

A Philadelphia native, Melissa stayed close to home and received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology from Ursinus College and Villanova University, respectively, and her doctorate in educational psychology from Temple University.

Carol Morrison is a principal psychometrician in the Psychometrics and Data Analysis department at NBME. She provides psychometric oversight for the medical school Subject Examination Program and the Self-Assessment Program. She enjoys meeting with medical school faculty and students to understand how NBME assessments and score reports can continue to evolve to meet their needs and support their desired score inferences. 

Carol has supervised the scoring, analyses, standard setting and score reporting for numerous examination programs as a psychometrician and has also served in several management roles during her career at NBME. Additionally, she has published and presented research papers on various topics related to the examinations on which she has worked. 

Carol holds a doctorate in educational psychology with a specialization in quantitative methods from the University of Texas at Austin and received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Kansas.

Francis O’Donnell is a psychometrician at NBME. She is involved in psychometric activities and research for medical education assessment programs, including Customized Assessment Services, Subject Examinations and Self-Assessments. She also oversees scoring and quality assurance for a selection of certification programs and occasionally facilitates workshops for medical schools on topics such as item analysis and best practices in score reporting.

Francis is passionate about how assessment can support learning throughout medical students’ education trajectory. She has led or supported several initiatives related to communicating assessment results in ways that are clearer and more action oriented, and she recently contributed to the score report redesign and introduction of improved feedback for the Comprehensive Basic Science Examination and Comprehensive Basic Science Self-Assessment.

As technology advances, she looks forward to possibilities related to interactive, customizable dashboards. She is also interested in fairness and validity, including understanding the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on assessment performance, monitoring exam security and promoting fair outcomes through every step of the assessment cycle, from test development to reporting results. 

Francis received her doctorate in research, educational measurement, and psychometrics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to joining NBME in 2020, she worked as a research fellow at the UMass Center for Educational Assessment, taught graduate courses in research methods and statistics, and provided assessment support to the adult education branch of the Massachusetts Department of Education.

Saed Rezayi is an natural language processing (NLP) scientist in the Office of Research Strategy at NBME. He is interested in the intersection of education, linguistics, and NLP. At NBME, Saed is contributing to research on automated scoring, aiming to bring more efficiency to standardized testing methods. He also explores how NLP can be applied to improve patient-provider communication scoring.

Earning his doctorate in computer science from the University of Georgia, Saed specialized in NLP and knowledge graphs. His research during this time was centered around enhancing machine comprehension of data by integrating auxiliary knowledge. Prior to that, he completed his master’s in computer science from the University of Oregon.

Outside of his professional activities, Saed enjoys playing the setar and capturing moments through street photography.

Jonathan D. Rubright serves as vice president of the Office of Research Strategy at NBME, where he oversees the development of research agendas aligned with organizational strategy, enhances the NBME mission and brand through publications and professional activities, and contributes collaborative thought partnership to strategic challenges.

Jonathan’s research areas include measurement, clinical medicine and medical education. Within measurement, he has published on topics such as classification accuracy, modeling complex item types and modern validity theory. In medicine, he has published on applied validity studies, clinical trial design, neuropsychological assessment scoring and ethical issues in human subjects research. 

Jonathan holds a doctorate in research methodology and evaluation from the University of Delaware. He also received a master’s in statistics, measurement, assessment, and research technology from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Delaware.

Christopher Runyon is a measurement scientist at NBME. His current primary research focus is the assessment of clinical reasoning. He also has experience building automated scoring frameworks that utilize natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML).

His prior academic work includes the study of causal inference with observational data, thinking heuristics and biases, philosophical and mathematical logic, non-classical logic systems, and Indo-Tibetan Buddhism (especially Tibetan Buddhist Reasoning and Debate). He is interested in anything related to psychometrics, statistics, measurement, ML and NLP.

Christopher received his doctorate in quantitative methods at the University of Texas in Austin, a master’s in cognitive psychology at James Madison University, undergraduate degrees in philosophy and psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, and an undergraduate degree in religious studies at the University of Virginia.

Su Somay is a senior measurement scientist in the Office of Research Strategy at NBME. Her primary responsibilities include designing, supervising and contributing to innovative psychometric and assessment projects.

Her main research interests focus on automated scoring of performance-based assessments, natural language processing and speech recognition, clinical reasoning, and health systems science. She has also done research on a variety of areas, including equating, parameter estimation, Bayesian Item Response Theory models and validity.

She received her doctorate in psychometrics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2007, where she was awarded the Psychometric Fellowship in 2006. Su also holds a master’s in social psychology from the Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey.

Raja G. Subhiyah is a principal measurement scholar and senior psychometrician at NBME. He joined NBME in 1990 as a psychometrician and since then has held several positions, including associate vice president.

During his tenure at NBME, he has participated in numerous conferences, given presentations and published many papers. He has worked with more than 30 client programs and designed, implemented and supervised psychometric work in almost all fields of testing and measurement. His areas of expertise include standard-setting, item response theory and psychometrics.

Raja received a doctorate in measurement and testing, a master’s in educational psychology and a bachelor’s in physics. He has taught physics at various institutions, including the American University of Beirut.

Kimberly Swygert is the director of Test Development Innovations at NBME. Her current projects include the piloting and implementation of automated item generation technology; implementing innovative test security methods; overseeing test construction, multimedia, and the development of applications that use natural language processing, machine learning, and other artificial intelligence technologies to support test development; and developing an artificial intelligence strategy for the organization.

A psychometrician for 24 years, Kimberly has a proven track record of excellence in the psychometric and health professions education fields across multiple domains, including applied psychometric work and research, test development, innovative item development, test construction and test security. She regularly presents at conferences, such as the Association of Test Publishers (ATP), the National Council for Measurement in Education and the Conference on Test Security, and has published chapters on item and test development in recent editions of Assessment for Health Professions Education and Handbook of Test Development.

Kimberly is on the Board of Directors for ATP, and she serves as a psychometric advisory panel member for organizations such as the Federation of State Boards of Physical Therapy and American Institute for Certified Public Accountants. In 2018, she was inducted as a fellow into the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. She received her doctorate in quantitative psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ye Tong is the senior vice president of Assessment Operations at NBME and oversees content and test development, psychometric and data analysis, and operations management.

A nationally recognized measurement expert, she has produced presentations and publications in the areas of assessment best practices, equity in assessment, balanced assessment system and assessment policy, as well as technical psychometrics theory and practices related to item response theory, generalizability theory, equating, linking, and more.

Ye is a Past President for the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME), one of the founding Board of Directors for Women in Measurement and a founding Advisory Board member for the Center of Measurement Justice. She serves on the Technical Advisory Committee for a number of states and districts and on the Editorial Boards for the Journal of Educational Measurement and Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice.

Victoria Yaneva is a senior data scientist at NBME and an honorary research fellow at the University of Wolverhampton.

Her interests lie in the various intersections between natural language processing (NLP) and educational measurement, with an emphasis on developing applications for high-stakes clinical exams. Examples include NLP research on predicting item characteristics from item text, automated scoring and automated distractor generation. Another area of interest is the use of eye-tracking methodology in process validity research for clinical multiple-choice questions.

Victoria completed her doctorate in NLP at the Research Group in Computational Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton in 2017, which was followed by a postdoctoral appointment in the same research group prior to joining NBME in 2018.

Yiyun Zhou serves as a natural language processing (NLP) data scientist at NBME. He is deeply intrigued by the intersections of advanced large language models and educational measurement. A significant focus of his work revolves around automatic scoring and enhancing the resilience of models against adversarial attacks. Furthermore, Yiyun emphasizes the use of generative AI to assist Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in item creation and in generating clinical reasoning for these items.

Yiyun earned his doctorate in analytics and data science from Kennesaw State University. With a rich background in the tech industry, Yiyun boasts extensive experience in deep learning R&D and seamlessly transitions research into business production.