Will Hopper

Will’s academic career began in the field of psychology, earning a B.S. in Psychology from the University of California San Diego and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As a graduate student, his research focused on developing mathematical models of episodic memory retrieval with mechanistic explanations of why successfully remembering information (e.g., during a test) produces much more durable memories than any form of restudying. The journey from a student who never considered math or computer programming as something they could do, to someone using skills from these disciplines to understand the human mind, inspired him to pursue teaching statistics and data science. In his teaching, Will integrates real-world applications and computational simulations to reveal the concepts and meaning behind the opaque formulas and recipes that seem to permeate statistics courses, so that students understand not only the what and the how, but the why as well.