AQMeN - Applied Quantitative Methods Network

Lindsay Paterson is Professor of Educational Policy in the School of Education, University of Edinburgh.

His undergraduate education was in Aberdeen University (where he studied mathematics and English literature), and he then did a PhD in statistics at Edinburgh University.

He gained postdoctoral experience working as a statistician for the Agricultural Research Council, after which he was a lecturer in the Department of Actuarial Mathematics and Statistics at Heriot-Watt University. While there, his research was mainly in epidemiological work in medicine.

Since the late 1980s he has worked in educational sociology. His main substantive interests are in the history of education, in educational policy, and in the relationship between education and democracy, on which topics he has written several books and many papers. The main statistical methods which he uses are multiple regression, logistic regression, loglinear analysis, multivariate regression and multi-level modelling.

He has served on the Research Resources Board of the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and has been an adviser to the Scottish Parliament's Education Committee. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2004.