Awards

National Academies - 1981

American Association for the Advancement of Science

About N. John Castellan

John Castellan, Jr. was born on January 21, 1939, in Denver, Colorado. He attended elementary school in Denver and then transferred to high school in Sacramento, California. He received a bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1961 and a doctorate from the University of Colorado in 1965. John immediately joined the faculty at Indiana University as an expert on the uses of computer technology for instructional purposes, mathematical psychology, and statistics. Castellan became associate dean in the office of Research and Graduate Development at Indiana University, served as president of the local chapter of the AAUP, and served at the National Science Foundation as director of the Decision, Risk, and Management Science Program from 1991-1993. John was a member of the Bloomington Faculty Council from 1983-1987 and from 1988-1991, and a member of the University Faculty Council from 1984-1987 and from 1990-1991. He was influential in the growth of computing on the Bloomington campus, serving on Bloomington's Campus Computer User's Committee and on the Academic Computing Policy Committee.

John's research and teaching interests were wide and ranging. He was active in such diverse fields as decision making under conditions of uncertainty, problem solving in instructional contexts, human-computer interactions, cognitive processes, mathematical models, computer simulation, computer applications and instructional design, multivariate analysis, and statistics. In 1979-1980, he was president of the Society for Computers in Psychology, after having served as conference chair, program chair, and a member of the steering committee. He chaired EDUCOM, an organization devoted to developing educational uses of information technology, and was on the American Psychological Association's Committee on Computer Initiatives (1988, 1990) and the Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Social Behavioral Science Computing (1977-79). He was a fellow of the American Psychological Society, of the American Psychological Association, Divisions 5 and 21, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. John was a member of numerous professional associations, including the Society for Computers in Psychology and the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. He edited Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers. He served on the editorial boards of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Social Science Computer Review, Behavioral Decision Making, Interactive Learning International, and Psycoloquy. He also maintained an award-winning newsletter for the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Perhaps the best known of his books was his extension of Siegel's treatise on nonparametric statistics: Siegel, S., and Castellan , N. J., Jr. (1988). Nonparametric statistics for the behavioral sciences, 2nd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill. N. John Castellan, Jr. died on December 21, 1993, at age 54.