John B. Willett

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John Willett was born in Leeds and raised in Harrogate, in the North of England, in 1947 and studied physics at Oxford University in the late 1960s. He taught high-school physics and mathematics at the Island School, Hongkong, in the 1970s and eventually settled in the USA in 1980, where he studied for his doctorate in quantitative methods at Stanford University.

Since 1985, he has been a faculty member at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where he is currently the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education. He is an expert in statistical methods for the analysis of longitudinal data, and teaches courses in a wide variety of quantitative methods.

His most recent book was co-authored with his colleague Judy Singer, and is entitled Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence. It was published in 2003 by Oxford University Press and covers topics in individual growth modeling and survival analysis. Willett and Singer are currently working on a companion volume on multilevel modeling.

In addition, Willett is writing -- with his collaborator, Richard J. Murnane -- a volume that presents new methods for making causal inferences in social and educational research. The new book is framed by a series of important substantive research questions in education and uses real examples to introduce material on the design of true experiments, the detection and utilization of natural experiments, difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity designs, instrumental variables estimation, and methods of selection bias correction.