George Mason University · Department of Psychology
Patrick E. McKnight, Ph.D.
Partner, father, professor, adventurer, and quantitative data enthusiast
Fairfax, Virginia patrickemcknight.com github.com/pem725
Academic CV Scholarly Impact Grad Stats Book The Sports Page Interactive Stats Lab Courses Teaching Research Publications AI Tools All Repos

I'm a professor at George Mason University who believes the best way to learn statistics is to care about the answer. My research lives at the intersection of measurement, motivation, and meaning — how people find purpose, how we measure psychological constructs, and how to do both without fooling ourselves.

This page collects my public work: course materials for students, research code, R packages, AI-powered tools, and the occasional project born purely from curiosity. The publications and repository list below refresh themselves live from ORCID and GitHub, so they are always current. If something here is useful to you, take it. If something is broken, let me know.

"The best way to learn statistics is to care about the answer."

Reproducible academic CV and NIH biosketch, kept current. Also available as PDF.
Professional
138 publications, searchable and filterable. Citation metrics, co-author network, and publication timeline — all from Google Scholar.
ResearchPublications

Teaching

See the full course list → — the graduate quantitative sequence (611, 612, 642, 643, 754, Bayesian) plus undergraduate statistics, psychopathology, and forensic psychology. A few highlights:

PSYC 405 — Forensic psychology through the lens of real cases. Students learn research methods by investigating the psychology of crime.
CoursePSYC 405
PSYC 325 — Understanding mental disorders through evidence, not folklore.
CoursePSYC 325
Graduate-level GLM — regression, ANOVA, and the framework that unifies them.
CourseRPSYC 642
The sequel — mixed models, multilevel modeling, and the edges of the GLM.
CourseRPSYC 643
PSYC 757 — Introduction to Bayesian methods for psychologists who want to update their priors.
CourseRBayesian
Reading notes from McElreath's Statistical Rethinking (2nd ed.) — a modern Bayesian approach to applied statistics.
RBayesian

Research

My research focuses on purpose, motivation, measurement, and trust. Publications are available through the usual channels — data and analysis code become public after we've finished our work with them. For published papers, see my CV.

Differentiating purpose from happiness — evidence from personal strivings, daily goal pursuit, and responses to life adversity. A live, reproducible research write-up. Source.
ResearchPurposeWell-being
Research on curiosity — its measurement, mechanisms, and motivation. Part of the ongoing work on what drives people to explore.
ResearchMotivation
An R package of functions I find useful in my work — social science research utilities not on CRAN, battle-tested in actual papers.
R PackageResearch
Tools for tracking and visualizing academic impact — the engine behind my Scholarly Impact page. Pull citation metrics, watch them over time, and see where the work lands.
ResearchPythonBibliometrics
Interactive simulation of the Dunning-Kruger effect — adjust sample size, reliability, and bias to see how the classic pattern emerges from simple statistical properties. Source code.
ResearchInteractive

AI & Automation

Claude Code skill that removes signs of AI-generated writing from text. Because good writing should sound like a person wrote it.
Claude CodeWriting
Enforces phased task execution — clarify, propose, review, then act. Prevents premature execution and ensures alignment.
Claude CodeWorkflow
Automates The Neuron's daily AI newsletter — aggregation, summarization, and distribution.
AutomationNewsletter
A Claude Code skill that turns the AI from yes-man into adversarial critic — rigorous analysis instead of easy agreement.
Claude CodeCritical Thinking
Translates Claude concepts — Projects, Skills, Artifacts, MCP, Memory — into their ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot equivalents. A cross-platform decoder ring for AI.
Claude SkillReference
A Claude Code skill that turns a folder of financial statements into a privacy-safe HTML tax report — handles PDF, XLSX, JSON, and CSV, strips PII, and computes itemize-vs-standard and dependent-care credits.
Claude SkillPythonFinance
Getting started with AI tools — a practical guide for academics and professionals.
AIGuide

Fun & Curiosity

A generic crossword puzzle builder for online and print. Make your own and distribute to others.
GamesWeb
A family solitaire game passed down through generations — now with 700 million simulated games to prove just how rare a win truly is. Computational probability meets family pride. Source code.
GamesProbabilityPython
Browser-based statistical demos — Dunning-Kruger simulator, distribution explorer, EFA, levels of measurement, and more. No R required. Source code.
TeachingInteractiveJavaScript

Recent Publications Live · ORCID

Pulled live from my ORCID record every time this page loads — new papers appear here automatically. Full history on my Scholarly Impact page and in my CV.

Loading latest publications from ORCID…

All Public Repositories Live · GitHub

Loading public repositories from GitHub… View all on GitHub →

Fetching the latest from github.com/pem725…

Browse every repository on GitHub →

Find Me

University: George Mason University, Department of Psychology, Fairfax, VA

Web: patrickemcknight.com

GitHub: github.com/pem725

CV: pem725.github.io/cv