Prof Peter M. Bentler's Profile

Prof Peter M. Bentler is an American psychologist and statistician and is a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on multivariate analysis and psychometrics, and he is the main developer of the structural equation modeling software EQS. As of 2017, his work has been cited more than 190,000 times. In 2014, he won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Psychometric Society. In 2015, he was selected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. Professor Bentler’s teaching interests include personality traits, substance abuse, psychometrics, as well as theories, methods, and applications of causal modeling.

A Citation for Honorary Fellow Prof Peter M. Bentler

Professor Peter M. Bentler is a renowned psychologist and statistician. He is known for his development of statistical procedures, model representational system, and the EQS computer algorithm for Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Professor Bentler developed many multivariate statistics and procedures for SEM model testing that are suitable for the analysis of psychological data. He made SEM accessible to a large audience of researchers by providing them with a computerized model representation system that is conceptually better matched to the language of scientific hypotheses. This approach has shaped future research, and is being used routinely by psychologists, statisticians, researchers and scientists around the world. He is also known for his contribution to personality, social psychology and research on substance abuse.

Born in Berlin in 1938, Professor Bentler moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 10 years old. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) majoring in anthropology/sociology in 1958. He went on to pursue his Master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh in social psychology, and then his doctoral degree in clinical psychology at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1964. After a postdoctoral year in personality assessment at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), Professor Bentler joined UCLA as a promising faculty member at the Department of Psychology, where he later served as chair (1999–2002) and is currently a distinguished professor of psychology and statistics.

Professor Bentler’s contributions to the field of psychology and statistics are vast and profound, which include the development of the Bentler-Weeks model and the Bentler-Bonett fit indices. His new EQS programme allows simpler access for researchers to do SEM. Professor Bentler and his research group provided many applications of SEM to examine real psychological issues, such as drug abuse. As well as his insightful articles on the fundamental definition of latent variable models, models for higher order moments, the comparative fit index, a mixture chi-square test, a non-iterative estimator, and new methods in reliability theory.

Professor Bentler upheld a long time interest in integrating personality and social psychology with research on substance abuse; he designed and implemented a longitudinal study of adolescent development that continues to constitute as part of his collaborative research at the Center for Collaborative Research on Drug Abuse funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Professor Bentler held leadership position in many professional associations. He was the ex-president of the Western Psychological Association; the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology; the Psychometric Society; and the American Psychological Association’s Division 5, Evaluation, Measurement and Statistics. Professor Bentler also received numerous prestigious awards, just to name a few, the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Applications of Psychology in 2007, the Psychometric Society’s Career Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2014, and the Western Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2015. In addition, Professor Bentler is also a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association; the American Psychological Association; the American Psychological Society, the American Statistical Association, as well as the Western Psychological Association.

As we all see, Professor Bentler’s career as a psychologist, statistician, scientist, clinician, teacher, and mentor is exemplary. He has taught countless young researchers and scientists who have gone on to establish outstanding careers in their own domain of specialization. The accomplishments of his many students and colleagues around the world, including China, are testaments to Professor Bentler’s academic excellence and great influence in the field of psychology and statistics.

Mr Chairman, in recognition of Professor Peter M. Bentler’s outstanding academic achievements as well as in appreciation of his support for furthering the development of psychology and statistics at UIC, it is my privilege to present him to you for the award of an Honorary Fellowship.