Dr. Florian Scharf will take up the position of Head of the Department of Psychological Research Methods at the Institute of Psychology in the summer semester of 2022. He studied and completed his doctorate in psychology at the University of Leipzig. He then worked as a postdoc at the University of Münster. The working group will deal with the validation and further development of psychological research methods, in particular statistical evaluation methods. One focus will be on the further development of structural equation models, which are popular in the social sciences, in order to combine them with approaches from the field of machine learning and to open up new fields of application (e.g. data from brain wave measurements, big data). The aim is to ensure the applicability of the method despite increasingly complex data sets.