Senior Associate Dean, Undergraduate Education
panter@unc.edu
919.843.7773
Dr. Abigail Panter (B.A., Wellesley College, 1985; Ph.D., New York University, 1989) is the Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and a professor of psychology and neuroscience in the L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a quantitative psychologist, she develops instruments, research designs and data-analytic strategies for applied research questions in higher education, personality and health. She serves as a program evaluator for UNC’s Chancellor’s Science Scholars Program, a multisite adaptation of the successful Meyerhoff Program. She was also principal investigator for The Finish Line Project, a $3 million First in the World grant from the U.S. Department of Education that systematically investigated new supports and academic initiatives, especially for first-generation college students. Her books include:The APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology (2023, 2nd ed.),The APA Dictionary of Terms in Statistics and Research Methods (2013), The Handbook of Ethics in Quantitative Methodology (2011), The Sage Handbook of Methods in Social Psychology (2004), as well as volumes on program evaluation for HIV/AIDS multisite projects.
At the undergraduate level she teaches statistics, research methods and a first-year seminar on communicating research results to others (“Talking about Numbers”). At the doctoral level she teaches courses in research design, classical and modern approaches to instrument/survey design, and test theory and multivariate methods. Panter received numerous awards for her teaching and mentoring, including the Tanner Award, the J. Carlyle Sitterson Award, a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Professorship and APA’s Jacob Cohen Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring.
She is past president of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Division on Quantitative and Qualitative Psychology and an APA fellow. She previously served on the Graduate Record Examination Advisory Board, a Social Security Administration advisory panel related to disability determination and APA’s Committee on Psychological Testing and Assessment. She regularly provides services for federal agencies, national advisory panels and editorial boards.
Panter has been a member of the University faculty since 1989. As senior associate dean, she and her leadership team ask the question each day, “Is this in the best interest of the student?” She oversees all of the College’s programs in undergraduate education: Thrive Advising Hubs, Undergraduate Research, the Center for Student Success (including the Learning Center, the Writing Center, Peer Mentoring and Summer Bridge), Undergraduate Curricula (including First Year Seminars), the Office of Instructional Innovation, Robertson Scholars Leadership Program and Honors Carolina. Among her active work on campus, she has helped develop the new general education curriculum, IDEAs in Action, a new holistic case management model of academic advising, programs to increase the high-impact academic experiences for undergraduate students and research about those experiences, security in the classroom, and ways to support students as they approach graduation.
- Telephone: 919.843.7773