Meet Our Experts

Cindy Hill, PhD, is a Principal Research Psychologist at ACT and a major contributor to the WorkKeys® system. She specializes in validation research for assessments used in hiring, certification, and licensure, including job analysis, test development, standard setting, and score validation. Her recent research focuses on credential alignment and the stacking of credentials across education and workforce pathways.

Chi-Yu Huang is a lead psychometrician in Applied Research at ACT, Inc. She has extensive experience in operational psychometric procedures for licensure and certification examinations, computerized-based testing, and data forensics analyses.

Dongmei Li is a Lead Psychometrician at ACT who leads work on complex measurement challenges to advance valid and equitable assessment systems. Her expertise and innovations focus on fairness and score comparability, including test equating and scaling, growth modeling, computer‑adaptive testing, and automated essay scoring.

Xin Li is Senior Director of Academic Measurement Psychometrics at ACT. She leads a team of psychometricians responsible for operational psychometrics, as well as the development and implementation of innovative and effcient psychometric practices. She has extensive experience in ensuring the technical quality and fairness of assessments. Her expertise includes assessment design, large-scale data analysis, and computer adaptive/multi-stage testing. She is known for driving innovation and automation in psychometric processes, and applying data-driven solutions to support decision-making.

Ruitao Liu is a Senior Research Engineer in the MRD-Digital Science team at ACT. He works at the intersection of psychometrics, data science, and artificial intelligence, with a focus on item parameter modeling, automated scoring, assessment design, and personalized learning applications.

Carol Ogletree is a Senior Industrial/Organizational Psychologist who leads and collaborates on consulting projects for external clients to guide them in their implementation of workforce products. She plays an integral role in developing and maintaining ACT’s proprietary job analysis software and its companion database, JobPro.  She facilitates workshops to teach clients how to implement the job/curriculum/occupational profiling component of ACT’s WorkKeys® system, and mentors them through their subsequent consulting engagements. She monitors and performs quality control on incoming client job analysis data.  

Helen Palmer is director of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at ACT. Her work involves a variety of issues related to the use of assessments in the workplace.

Kristen Phipps is a Lead Program Manager, leveraging project management expertise and an educator’s perspective to drive stakeholder‑informed product improvements through collaboration with internal teams and external vendors. 

Jeff Schiel, a lead research scientist at ACT, specializes in survey methodology and sampling. His research interests include the study of high school students' educational experiences and plans.

Joyce Z. Schnieders is a Research Scientist II at ACT specializing in mixed-methods education research. Her research focuses on learner experiences that support academic and workforce success.

MinJeong Shin is a lead psychometrician at ACT. Her research interest includes practical measurement issues in K-12 standardized assessments.

Shichao Wang is a psychometrician II at ACT specializing in equating and scaling. Her research focuses on vertical scaling, validity analyses, and large language models in assessment.

Scott Wood is a Lead Psychometrician at ACT, specializing in automated essay scoring and automated constructed response scoring. He has conducted research on the CRASE automated scoring engine for over 15 years. 

Jing-Ru Xu is a psychometrician at ACT. Her research interest includes practical measurement issues in large-scale assessment.