Camilo A. Cárdenas Hurtado

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Research Institute for Child Development and Education (RICDE) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), working with Dr. Terrence D. Jorgensen on the Open-Science NL grant: “Infra-Structural Equation Modelling: Advancing Open Software, Education, and Application of an Indispensable Theory-Testing Framework” (NWO/OS-NL grant 500.040.2516). Our goal is to scale-up lavaan, the leading open-source R package for structural equation modelling (SEM), to provide researchers with a state-of-the-art, open-source, commercial-quality R package for latent variable modelling.

I am also a Visiting Fellow (by courtesy) in the Department of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). I obtained a PhD in Statistics from the LSE, working under supervision of Professor Irini Moustaki and Dr. Yunxiao Chen.

My research focuses on methodological and computational developments of latent variable models, with applications in the social and behavioural sciences. I am mostly interested in measurement problems, where the variables of interest are not observed. On the technical side, my work ties elements from stochastic and high-dimensional constrained optimisation, stochastic-approximation and regularisation techniques in marginal maximum likelihood estimation problems, distributional regression models, and semi-parametric regression models.

Before transitioning into academia, I was an Economist at Banco de la República (Colombian Central Bank), working on macroeconomic analysis and forecasting.