John B. Willett

Who is John B. Willett?

John Willett is a U.S.-based professor of education, specializing in the teaching, development and application of quantitative methods.

He was born in 1947 in Leeds and raised from the age of 10 in Harrogate, in the North of England. He studied physics at Oxford University from 1967 through 1970. He taught high-school physics and mathematics at the Island School, Hong Kong, from 1972 through 1978, and trained in-service teachers of physics in the School of Education at Hong Kong University, from 1978 through 1980. He settled in the USA in 1980, where he obtained a doctorate in quantitative methods at Stanford University.

Since 1985, he has been a faculty member at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, where he is currently the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education. He is an expert in the application of statistical methods for the analysis of longitudinal data, and he teaches courses in quantitative methods.

With his colleague Judy Singer, he authored the book Applied Longitudinal Data Analysis: Modeling Change and Event Occurrence. It was published in 2003 by Oxford University Press and covers topics in individual growth modeling and survival analysis.