Dr Jon Heron

Jon Heron is Research Fellow and Statistician in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), University of Bristol. While at the Centre, Jon made an important contribution to our short courses and summer schools, in which his expertise in item response theory is invaluable. 

Jon obtained a 1st Class Honours degree in Mathematics at the University of Bristol in 1994, followed by an MSc in Statistics with distinction at Sheffield University in 1995. His PhD, obtained from the University of Bristol in 1999, addressing diet choice issues in behavioural ecology, employed dynamic programming and optimal control theory using the SPlus program. Today he prefers to use Stata and MPlus, two of the most important new languages for today's psychometricians.

Jon has published widely and taught clinical epidemiology to groups of first year medics for the past 3 years. He currently holds, together with his colleagues Joinson and Lewis, an ESRC grant examining developmental trajectories of depressive symptoms in childhood as well as the risk factors involved.