Bethany Bray, PhD

Bethany C. Bray, Ph.D., is Associate Director for Scientific and Infrastructure Development at the Institute for Health Research and Policy (IHRP) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). IHRP is an interdisciplinary institute that serves as a home and incubator of research spanning the social, behavioral, and public health sciences to advance health, well-being, and quality of life. Bethany’s research focuses on the development and application of advanced latent class modeling techniques to questions about the development of substance use, with a special emphasis on its relation to the development of comorbid risk behaviors, such as risky sexual behavior and gambling. Her technical work has focused on flexible approaches to adding predictors, outcomes, moderators, mediators, and inverse propensity score weights to latent class models. Bethany’s work has been funded through the National Institutes of Health, the Alcohol Beverage Medical Research Foundation, and the National Center for Responsible Gaming. She has a passion for presenting technical material to social, behavioral, and public health scientists and has taught numerous workshops on latent class modeling, as well as courses on research methods, psychometrics, and categorical data analysis. You can visit her personal webpage here.