Anna Brown is a psychometrician with an established reputation and extensive industry experience, currently working at the University of Kent. Previously, she taught short courses in applied psychometrics at the University of Cambridge. Her experiences outside of academia included research and test development at the Research Division of the UK largest occupational test publisher SHL Group, where she held senior and principal psychometrician positions for many years.
Anna completed a 5-year Master’s programme in Mathematics with distinction, and a PhD in Psychology with distinction. Her PhD research led to the development of the Thurstonian Item Response Theory (TIRT) model described as a breakthrough in scoring of forced-choice questionnaires, and received the "Best Dissertation" award from the Psychometric Society. Applications of this enabled the development of novel personality assessment tools that are resistant to response biases and ‘faking good’, assessing well over million candidates in at least 37 different languages across 40 different countries every year.
Anna’s research focuses on psychological measurement and psychometric testing, particularly issues in test validity and test fairness. She specialises in modelling response biases and faking, scaling of comparative data, measurement invariance and other measurement models using IRT and SEM frameworks more broadly. She provides psychometric advice to several organisations in the private and public sectors internationally. Anna served as an elected member on the Council of the International Test Commission for 8 years, chairing its Research and Guidelines Committee. She also serves as a member of the editorial Board of the International Journal of Testing, and as an ad-hoc reviewer for countless journals in the field of psychometrics.