About

I am an Associate Professor of Psychological Data Science at Swansea University, based in the School of Psychology.

Research

My research spans face perception, facial morphometrics, and the statistical methods used to study them. Over the years I’ve worked on topics including:

• how facial colouration relates to actual and perceived health
• how cosmetics are used to alter appearance, and what that signals
• the structure of first impressions from faces, and what drives them
• hierarchical and latent-variable models for psychological and psychometric data

I’m a devout Bayesian, and much of my recent work uses PyMC for generative modelling of face-rating and morphometric data, and various other challenges in the social sciences.

Teaching

I teach statistics, data analysis, and programming to psychology students. I’ve written two free online courses in Python:

• Data Analysis with Python — an introduction aimed at social-science students.
• Statistical Modelling with Python — a more advanced take on building and interpreting statistical models.

Background

I completed my Ph.D at Bangor University, and went to postdoctoral research in Gettysburg College, USA. I joined the School of Psychology at Swansea as a Lecturer in 2016.

Contact

Email: alex.l.jones@swansea.ac.uk