Larry Hedges
Larry Hedges, Ph.D., is Board of Trustees Professor at Northwestern University, where he holds appointments in statistics, psychology, education and social policy, and medical social sciences.
Professor Hedges’ research straddles many fields—including statistics, sociology, psychology, and educational policy. He is best known for his work in developing statistical methods for meta-analysis (a statistical analysis of the results of multiple studies that combines their findings) in the social, medical, and biological sciences. Meta-analysis is a key component of evidence-based social research.
Examples of some his recent studies include: understanding the costs of generating systematic reviews, differences between boys and girls in mental test scores, the black-white gap in achievement test scores, and frameworks for international comparative studies on education.
Widely published, Hedges has authored or co-authored numerous journal articles and 13 books, including the seminal Statistical Methods for Meta-Analysis (with I. Olkin, Elsevier, 1985) and The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis (with H. Cooper and J. Valentine, Russell Sage, 2019). According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited more than 130,000 times.
In 2018, Hedges received the Yidan Prize in Education Research. In 2023, he was selected by the World Cultural Council to receive the José Vasconcelos World Award for Education.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Statistical Association, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Educational Research Association. He is also a member of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, which established an annual endowed lecture in his honor. He was selected to give the inaugural Hedges Lecture in 2016.
Hedges was nominated by President Barack Obama to the Board of Directors of the National Board for Education Sciences, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate in June 2012, and was elected Chair of the Board in 2016. He was elected “Statistician of the Year” by the Chicago chapter of the American Statistical Association for 2013–14. In 2015, he received the Sells Award for lifetime contributions to multivariate research from the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology. In 2018, he became the third American to be elected an Honorary Member of the European Association of Methodology.
You can visit his university webpage here.