

Daphna Harel
Associate Professor of Applied Statistics; Co-Director of A3SR MS Program
Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities
Daphna Harel is an applied statistician who studies issues of measurement and modeling in the applied health sciences. Her research focuses on modeling challenges for data arising from self-reported questionnaires and crowdsourcing, and requiring the use of multilevel models. Her methodological work focuses on the creation of theoretically justified guidelines for statistical analysis and issues of model misspecification in polytomous Item Response Theory, and the shortening of patient reported outcome measures. Harel received her PhD from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McGill University.
Her most recent work is in improving statistical practice as it pertains to LGBTQIA+ individuals and their data, as well as improving societal outcomes for members of this community. She currently PI's the NYU QUEER data lab.
Selected Publications
- Measuring fatigue in SSc: a comparison of the Short Form-36 Vitality subscale and Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy–Fatigue scale (Rheumatology, 2012)
- Social, Emotional, and Academic Impact of Residual Speech Errors in School-Aged Children: A Survey Study (Seminars in Speech and Language, 2015)
- Summed and Weighted Summary Scores for the Medsger Disease Severity Scale Compared with the Physician’s Global Assessment of Disease Severity in Systemic Sclerosis (Journal of Rheumatology, 2016)
- Using Optimal Test Assembly Methods for Shortening Patient-Reported Outcome Measures: Development and Validation of the Cochin Hand Function Scale-6 – A Scleroderma Patient-centered Intervention Network (SPIN) Cohort Study (Arthritis Care & Research, 2016)
- Deriving gradient measures of child speech from crowdsourced ratings (Journal of Communication Disorders, 2016)
- Finding the experts in the crowd: Validity and reliability of crowdsourced measures of children’s gradient speech contrasts (Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics, 2017)
- Assessment via the Oculus of Visual “Weighting” and “Reweighting” in Young Adults (Motor Control, 2017)
- Selecting an acoustic correlate for automated measurement of /r/ production in children (International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 2017)
- Survey use in academic contexts: considerations and guidelines. In Secolsky, C. & Denison, D.B. (Eds), Handbook on Measurement, Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. (2nd ed.) Routledge. (2017).
- Feasibility and reliability of a virtual reality Oculus platform to measure sensory integration for postural control in young adults (Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 2018)
- On the effects of signal processing on sample entropy for postural control (PLoS ONE, 2018)