Welcome to my personal website. Prior to academia, I worked in the medical device industry as a Statistician for 8 years while earning my PhD (nights and weekends) in Statistics Education from the University of Minnesota (advisors: Joan Garfield & Robert delMas) where I had previously earned an MS in Statistics (advisor: Douglas Hawkins). At Penn State, I lead a Statistics & Data Science Education Research Lab in the Department of Statistics (jointly with Neil Hatfield) and served as Director of Undergraduate Programs including administrative oversight for a Statistics Major, Statistics Minor, and the Statistical Modeling track within our interdisciplinary Data Sciences Major. I teach a variety of statistics courses including introductory statistics, R programming, and the senior capstone at Penn State. I'm currently PI for NSF:IUSE Project CLASSIFIES--which seeks to develop and investigate tools that leverage NLP to assist STEM instructors in large-enrollment classes with providing student feedback on short-answer tasks. In 2021, I joined the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education (CAUSE) as co-Associate Director for Research (jointly with Laura Le at University of Minnesota), and was appointed as Executive Director in 2024. I'm also Affiliated Faculty with the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) and the Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence (CSRAI) at Penn State, and Associate Editor for the Statistics Education Research Journal.
Contact Information
Matthew D. Beckman, PhD
Associate Research Professor
Department of Statistics
Pennsylvania State University
461 Pollock Road
University Park, PA 16802
