Shlomo Sawilowsky

Shlomo S. Sawilowsky is professor of educational statistics and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he has received teaching, mentoring, and research awards.

Academic career
Sawilowsky obtained his Ph.D. in 1985 at the University of South Florida. He was inducted into the USF chapter of the Phi Kappa Phi honor society on May 17, 1981, when he received his M.A. In 2008 Sawilowsky served as president of the American Educational Research Association Special Interest Group/Educational Statisticians. He served as Assistant Dean in the College of Education at WSU for several years.

Contributions to applied statistics and social/behavioral sciences
In 2000, the AMSTAT News, a publication of the American Statistical Association, described Professor Sawilowsky's award of Distinguished Faculty Fellow "in recognition of Sawilowsky's outstanding scholarly achievements in applied statistics, psychometrics, and experimental design in education and psychology."

Applied statistics
He is the author of a statistics textbook that presents statistical methods via Monte Carlo simulation methods, editor of a volume on real data analysis published by the American Educational Research Association SIG/Educational Statisticians, and author of over a hundred articles in applied statistics and social sciences journals. Sawilowsky has also authored 24 entries in statistics encyclopedias.

His presentation titled "The Rank Transform," with co-author R. Clifford Blair, was awarded the 1985 Florida Educational Research Association & 1986 American Educational Research Association State/Regions Distinguished Paper Award. Many of his publications are related to rank-based nonparametric statistics. For example, an examination of the robustness and comparative power properties of the rank transform statistic was called a "major Monte Carlo study". Hettmansperger and McKean stated that Sawilowsky provided "an excellent review of nonparametric approaches to testing for interaction" (p. 254-255).

Sawilowsky's Monte Carlo work has been cited as an exemplar for designing simulation studies. His work has been cited on a variety of statistical issues, such as
 * demonstrating sequential procedures of testing underlying assumptions of parametric tests, commonly recommended in textbooks and statistics software user manuals, "increases the rate of Type I error";
 * rounding down degrees of freedom when using tabled critical values decreases statistical power;
 * alternatives to the winsorized sample standard deviation can be invoked to increase the statistical power of Yuen's confidence interval;
 * maximum likelihood methods (e.g., one-step Huber) are superior to trimming in constructing robust estimators;
 * using effect sizes obtained when the null hypothesis has been retained inflates Type I errors in meta-analysis; and
 * explicating "criteria for an appropriate Monte Carlo simulation."

Psychometrics
In psychological testing, Sawilowsky is a co-author of a self-determination assessment battery; an instrument designed to assess locus of control, self-esteem, and self-concept among at-risk adolescents; an instrument "which measures future orientation, knowledge of the realities of child rearing, personal intentions, and sexual self-efficacy;"  and a college well-being instrument. Sawilowsky was the initial proponent in favor of psychometric theory (reliability refers to the test) over datametric theory (reliability refers to the data), a controversy with implications for test theory, role of tests in expert testimony, test validity, etc. The debate was discussed in Educational and Psychological Measurement and elsewhere. Although the issue has not been resolved, the current non-aligned opinion "lean[s] toward the Sawilowsky position." In classical test theory, he developed the Sawilowsky I test, a statistical test used to help demonstrate evidence of construct validity in the multitrait-multimethod matrix.

Experimental design
Sawilowsky's Monte Carlo work on comparing randomized vs quasi-experimental design has been described as "one of the strongest examples" demonstrating limitations of quasi-experimental design, and "provides possibly one of the strongest cases for the superiority of randomized designs."

Mentorship
In 1998, the AMSTAT News reported Sawilowsky's Awards for Excellence in Teaching, and Graduate Mentorship, and noted "Professor Sawilowsky's exceptional record as an academician is reflected in the excellence with which he mentors graduate students." He has mentored 52 dissertations in applied statistics as major professor according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project. His doctoral students include D. Lynn Kelley (1994), Patrick D. Bridge (1996), Todd C. Headrick (1997), Michael J. Nanna (1997),  Gail C. Fahoome (1999), Bruce Fay (2003), David Fluharty (2007), Boris Shulkin (2007), and Tammy A. Grace (doctoral candidate).

ProQuest indicates he has chaired dissertations in many other fields, such as kinesiology, nursing education, and teacher education; and co-chaired a dissertation on process drama. He also served as 2nd advisor on 19 doctoral dissertations, and numerous more as a committee member.

Editorship
Sawilowsky is the founder and editor of the Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods. It was created to provide an outlet for research using Monte Carlo and other resampling methods, nonparemtric and other robust methods, permutation and other exact or approximately exact methods, and statistical algorithms.