Dr. Lu has been rigorously trained as a quantitative methodologist. Before she joined the Quantitative Methodologies (QM) program at the University of Georgia (UGA), she obtained a PhD on Quantitative Psychology at the University of Notre Dame (ND) and a MA on Mathematics at Temple University. The training she received has provided her a solid grounding in mathematics, statistics, programming, and quantitative methodologies. In general, she has expertise in structural equation modeling (SEM), longitudinal data analysis, hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), and computational statistics such as Bayesian. During her ten years' professional career at UGA, her research has focused on developing innovative statistical approaches to address perennial challenges in statistical modeling such as mixture structure, reliabilities, model selection, missing data, outliers, topic modeling, and also promoting statistical models to applied research areas through collaborating, mentoring, and classroom teaching.