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Lecturer in Big Data Analytics and Quantitative Social Science, Cambridge Judge Business School

Dr David Stillwell is Deputy Director of The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge. He is also Lecturer in Big Data Analytics and Quantitative Social Science at the Cambridge Judge Business School. He obtained his BSc in Psychology at Nottingham in 2007 before progressing to an MSc in Research Methods in 2008. He earned his PhD in Decision Making from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham in December 2012.

David would describe himself as a computer nerd, but we perceive him rather as a Mark Zuckerberg of Psychometrics. In June 2007, between obtaining his first degree and embarking on his Masters, David began a personal side project designing applications for social networks. The result was the myPersonality Facebook application that allows users to take real psychometric tests and receive feedback on their results. Today myPersonality has collected data from more than 6 million people, and the resulting database has become a priceless academic resource used by numerous researchers all over the world.

Since these early successes, the influence of David's work has expanded considerably, so that today its impact ranges from targeted online advertising, psychometric adaptive test development, ipsative techniques in test design, the real-time analysis of online digital footprints, behavioural prediction and state-of-the-art school examinations. It is for very good reason that Pacific Standard Magazine has recently named him among their 'top 30 thinkers under 30', the young men and women they predict will have a serious impact on social, political and economic issues in the near future.

Experience

  • 2015–present
    Lecturer, Judge Business School, University of Cambridge