Program Developers

In the early 1990's, Mplus was envisioned by Drs. Bengt and Linda Muthén as a generalization of Bengt's Liscomp program. Development of Mplus started in October 1995 with the first version being released in November 1998, the second version in February 2001, the third version in March 2004, the fourth version in February 2006, and the fifth version in November 2007. The development of Mplus has been funded in part with Federal funds from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, in the form of Small Business Innovation Research contracts and grants to the small business Muthén & Muthén.

Besides Linda and Bengt, the current Mplus development team consists of Tihomir Asparouhov and Thuy Nguyen. This team has been together for several years and under its development the capabilities of Mplus have grown dramatically. The other member of the Mplus team is Michelle Conn who has been the Office Manager for the last several years. Over the years, several other programmers have been involved in the development of Mplus including Stephen Du Toit, Shyan Lam, Kerby Shedden, and Damir Spisic.

Following is a brief description of the members of the current Mplus development team.

Linda Muthén obtained her Ph.D. in the Research Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at UCLA. She was formerly the Manager of Quality Control and Customer Support at BMDP Statistical Software. She is the Director of Product Development at Muthén & Muthén where her responsibilities include coordinating product development, designing the Mplus language, providing customer support, writing the user's guide and other materials related to Mplus, and teaching.

Bengt Muthén obtained his Ph.D. in Statistics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden and is Professor Emeritus at UCLA. He is a former President of the Psychometric Society. He has published extensively on latent variable modeling and many of his procedures are implemented in Mplus. He is responsible for determining statistical directions for Mplus, formulating new models, methodological writing, and teaching.

Tihomir Asparouhov obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. His responsibilities include the development of new statistical techniques, algorithms, and models; statistical programming; and statistical and technical writing.

Thuy Nguyen obtained her M.S. in Computer Science from New York University. Her responsibilities include development and programming of the user interface, Mplus language generator, editor, and graphics module in addition to customer support and being responsible for maintaining the Mplus source code and test problems.