Dr. Kathleen Preston

Faculty Fellow for QuaNTitative Research Support

Kathleen Preston, Ph.D. is a a product of Titans Reaching Higher! She was born and raised in Fullerton and had the opportunity to attend CSUF for her college education. As an undergraduate here, at CSUF, Dr. Preston earned a B.A. as a double-major in Psychology and Music with a vocal emphasis, and an M.A. in Psychological Research. She earned her Ph.D. in 2011 in quantitative psychology from UCLA. Her research interests are in utilizing Item Response Theory, specifically the nominal response model, to develop and refine psychological measurement tools. Dr. Preston is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at where she serves as the Office of Research/FDC Faculty Fellow for Quantitative Research Support and teaches several statistics courses included introductory, advanced, and multivariate statistics, as well as psychometrics, and structural equation modeling.

Dr. Preston is co-director of the Fullerton Longitudinal Study where she applies advanced statistical techniques to long-term longitudinal data. Dr. Preston is considered an expert in statistical analysis using R programming and she has recently published a textbook on analyzing multivariate statistics using R. She has given numerous invited statistical presentations and workshops at national and regional conferences, universities, and federal government agencies. Dr. Preston has the expertise, leadership, training, and motivation necessary to successfully carry out the proposed research project.

Recently, Dr. Preston served as the Evaluator for the EMBRACE grant (HRSA Workforce Diversity) for the culminating project years (2019-2020) where she oversaw database management, conducted data cleaning and multivariate statistical analyses, and interpreted and presented results supporting the conceptualized model. Currently, Dr. Preston is serving as the evaluation coordinator for a newly awarded ENGAGE grant (HRSA Workforce Diversity) where she will establish and maintain the quantitative database and perform statistical analysis.

Dr. Preston was recently featured in a ‘Research in Action’ podcast in which she discusses her research interests. In addition to her academic work, she sings with Pacific Chorale, a professional chorus based in south Orange County, and is actively involved with her church. She resides in Brea with her husband, Nicholas, daughter, Zelda, and dogs Chewbacca and Han Solo (can you tell her daughter loves Star Wars?).