Dr. David P. MacKinnon

Foundation Professor of Psychology

David P. MacKinnon, Ph.D. graduated from Harvard University in 1979 and earned the Ph.D. in measurement and psychometrics from UCLA in 1986. He was an Assistant Professor of Research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Prevention Research from 1986 to 1990. He has been at Arizona State University since 1990 and is affiliated with the Prevention Intervention Research Center and the Research in Prevention Laboratory. Dr. MacKinnon teaches graduate analysis of variance, mediation analysis, and statistical methods in prevention research courses. He has given numerous workshops and invited presentations in the United States and Europe. In 2011 he received the Nan Tobler Award from the Society for Prevention Research for his book on statistical mediation analysis. He has served on federal review committees including a term on the Epidemiology and Prevention Research review committee and was a consulting editor for the journal, Prevention Science. Dr. MacKinnon has been principal investigator on many federally funded grants and has had a National Institute on Drug Abuse grant to develop and evaluate methods to assess mediation since 1990. He recently received the MERIT award for this mediation analysis research. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, American Psychological Association Measurement and Statistics Division, and the Society for Prevention Research. He is a Thomson-Reuters highly cited researcher. Dr. MacKinnon has wide ranging interests in statistics and methodology but his primary interest is in the area of statistical methods to assess how prevention and treatment programs achieve their effects.