Sara Tomek, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor in the Quantitative Methods program in the Department of Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Baylor. She is serving as the Interim Department Chair for the 2023-2024 academic year. Dr. Tomek earned a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, along with two master’s degrees in Psychology and Statistics from the same institution. Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor in 2019, Dr. Tomek held a faculty position at The University of Alabama and worked at both the Georgia Center for Assessment at the University of Georgia and the Life Span Institute at the University of Kansas.

Dr. Tomek is a research methodologist with a love of the entire research process, from conceptualization of a research question to dissemination and interpretation of results, and the infusion and cohesion of all the steps in between.  Although broadly trained, Dr. Tomek’s primary statistical focus is in the utilization of longitudinal growth models. The theme of much of Dr. Tomek’s research focuses on adolescent risk behaviors and the psychological, social, and behavioral outcomes associated with them.

Dr. Tomek has published over 50 articles, book chapters, technical reports, and encyclopedia entries and has one book to date. A large number of publications utilize the Mobile Youth and Poverty Study, a 14-year longitudinal study of at-risk adolescents living in high poverty areas in Mobile, Alabama. Dr. Tomek’s work has been published in such journals as Applied Psychological Measurement, Youth and Society, School Mental Health, Journal of Child and Family Studies, and Journal of Clinical Psychology.  Much of Dr. Tomek’s work is interdisciplinary, spanning multiple disciplines such as Psychology, Sociology, Health, and Education.

Dr. Tomek is the past chair of the AERA Special Interest Group (SIG) Multiple Linear Regression: General Linear Model. She has reviewed manuscripts for over 15 different journals, including Journal of Research on Adolescence, Youth and Society, and Development Psychology. Dr. Tomek and her colleagues won the award for Outstanding Research Article in the Journal of Mental Health Counseling for 2017-2018.