Dan Richard

I began my pursuit of higher education at Northeast Louisiana University in Monroe, Louisiana where I majored in Psychology and received by Bachelors of Science degree in 1990. I received a Master of Arts degree in Psychology from NLU in 2002 and worked for approximately three years as a Psychological Associate case manager at G. B. Cooley Services in West Monroe, LA.  I entered my Ph.D. program at Texas Christian University in the Fall of 1996, where I pursued a degree in Experimental Psychology – Social with an emphasis in Quantitative Methods. My dissertation mentor,  Dr. Charlie Bond, supported my development in quantitative approaches to explaining human social behavior and in meta-analytic techniques. In the later years of my Ph.D. program, I worked as a Research Consultant with Tangram Corporation Inc., a research and consulting firm for restaurant and real-estate companies. It was at Tangram, under the direction of Dr. Rich Fenker, where I discovered my love for big data, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. In 2017, I became the founding Co-Director of the Florida Data Science for Social Good program.

I joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Florida in the Fall of 2001. In 2006, I took on the leadership of the Office of Faculty Enhancement at UNF. In 2019, I took on the leadership of the Center for Community-Based Learning. I enjoy partnering with other social trustees of knowledge to make positive change in our communities, and I especially enjoy helping others in that exploration as well. I teach courses in research methods, statistics, social psychology, and a seminar course in revenge and forgiveness. I work with several graduate students on research projects related to applied lay epistemology, including cultural influences in conflict resolution, recidivism, terrorism and radicalization, transformational learning and community-based learning.