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MooreMetrics
Tyler M. Moore

Tyler M. Moore, PhD

Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

I am a quantitative methodologist. I design, evaluate and shorten psychological tests, model geographic characteristics of neighborhoods and other environments, and build predictive models — risk calculators — from longitudinal data. MooreMetrics is where the same toolkit gets pointed at everything else.

Research

Psychological measurement. Designing, evaluating and shortening tests of cognition, personality and psychopathology — including fully computerized adaptive (CAT) versions of cognitive and clinical batteries — with factor analysis, item response theory and structural equation modeling. The same work has ranged from clinic waiting rooms to NASA’s Cognition battery for astronauts.

Environment and geography. Using census, EPA, noise and other geospatial data to characterize living environments, and multilevel structural equation models to trace how neighborhoods shape behavior, cognition and health in the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort and the ABCD Study.

Prediction and risk. Machine-learning and longitudinal models that use what is known at one point in time to predict what happens later: psychosis-risk calculators for children and young adults, and treatment disengagement in coordinated specialty care.

Language models as data. A newer line of work: having large language models generate quantitative ratings at scale — seven million phenotype estimates across the tree of life, an uncertainty-graded property matrix for 16,000 compounds — and testing how far such data can be trusted.

Biography

I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, studied economics at Pomona College, took a master’s in social and organizational psychology at the University of Exeter, and completed a PhD in quantitative psychology at UCLA in 2012, with a focus on factor analysis and item response theory. I moved to West Philadelphia that year for a postdoctoral fellowship in psychometrics at Penn, and never left.

At Penn’s Brain Behavior Laboratory I have spent more than a decade on the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort and the studies that grew out of it: building and shortening the Penn Computerized Neurocognitive Battery, developing computerized adaptive tests of cognition and psychopathology, modeling the structure of psychiatric symptoms, and combining census, environmental and survey data to characterize the places people live. Along the way I helped develop and validate the Cognition test battery that NASA uses to track astronauts’ cognitive performance in spaceflight, and have been part of research groups studying mental health in two branches of the U.S. military. I am site MPI of a P01 project developing a risk calculator for treatment disengagement in early psychosis.

Beyond the lab I review for ten journals, sit on the editorial board of Assessment, and have mentored more than forty students, postdocs and junior colleagues, most of them to first-author publications. Since 2019 I have also built the tools on this site — partly as research into language models as sources of quantitative data, and partly because it is fun.

Appointments and degrees

2021 –
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania
2015 – 2021
Research Associate, then Senior Research Investigator and Research Analyst, Department of Psychiatry, Penn
2013 – 2015
Postdoctoral Fellow in psychometrics, Perelman School of Medicine, Penn
2012
PhD, Quantitative Psychology, UCLA (MA 2008) · NSF Graduate Research Fellow 2008–2011 · UCLA Chancellor’s Prize 2007
2005
MSc, Social and Organizational Psychology, University of Exeter, summa cum laude
2004
BA, Economics, Pomona College, cum laude

Selected publications

Thirteen of 262 peer-reviewed publications in 141 journals, plus five handbook chapters, as of the September 2026 CV. The full list is on Google Scholar and in the CV.

Google Scholar CV

  1. Moore TM, Reise SP, Depaoli S, Haviland MG (2015). Iteration of partially specified target matrices: applications in exploratory and Bayesian confirmatory factor analysis. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 50(2), 149–161.
  2. Moore TM, Calkins ME, Rosen AFG, Butler ER, Ruparel K, Fusar-Poli P, Koutsouleris N, McGuire P, Cannon TD, Gur RC, Gur RE (2022). Development of a probability calculator for psychosis risk in children, adolescents, and young adults. Psychological Medicine, 52(14), 3159–3167.
  3. Moore TM, Visoki E, Argabright ST, et al. (2022). Modeling environment through a general exposome factor in two independent adolescent cohorts. Exposome, 2(1), osac010.
  4. Moore TM, Di Sandro A, Scott JC, et al. (2023). Construction of a computerized adaptive test (CAT-CCNB) for efficient neurocognitive and clinical psychopathology assessment. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 386, 109795.
  5. Basner M, Savitt A, Moore TM, et al. (2015). Development and validation of the Cognition test battery for spaceflight. Aerospace Medicine and Human Performance, 86(11), 942–952.
  6. Moore TM, Applegate B, Lahey BB (2025). What the general factor of psychological problems is — and is not. Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, 134(4), 341–342.
  7. Moore TM, Walker K, Tung E, et al. (2025). Combined ketamine and psychotherapy provide no additional benefit beyond ketamine alone in treating depression or PTSD: evidence from a help-seeking sample. Journal of Affective Disorders, 381, 233–241.
  8. Lahey BB, Moore TM, Kaczkurkin AN, Zald DH (2021). Hierarchical models of psychopathology: empirical support, implications, and remaining issues. World Psychiatry, 20(1), 57–63.
  9. Moore TM, Butler ER, Scott JC, et al. (2021). When CAT is not an option: complementary methods of test abbreviation for neurocognitive batteries. Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 26(1), 35–54.
  10. Moore TM, Kaczkurkin AN, Durham EL, et al. (2020). Criterion validity and relationships between alternative hierarchical dimensional models of general and specific psychopathology. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 129(7), 677–688.
  11. Moore TM, Calkins ME, Reise SP, Gur RC, Gur RE (2018). Development and public release of a computerized adaptive (CAT) version of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. Psychiatry Research, 263, 250–256.
  12. Reise SP, Moore TM, Haviland MG (2010). Bifactor models and rotations: exploring the extent to which multidimensional data yield univocal scale scores. Journal of Personality Assessment, 92(6), 544–559.
  13. Reise SP, Moore TM (2023). Item response theory. In APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology, 2nd ed., vol. 1, pp. 809–835.

Preprints and essays

Work published here and on PsyArXiv rather than in journals: methods for using language models as data sources, large public datasets, and long-form syntheses on questions I could not leave alone.

Everything on MooreMetrics

The front page lists the tools with their catalog sizes.

Entertainment

Food, fashion and fragrance

Science and reference

People and places

Older tools

Research and collaborations

Essays

Odds and ends

Tyler M. Moore

Off the clock

Away from the keyboard: I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, and have lived in West Philadelphia since 2012. I keep a running catalog of the wild and naturalized plants of the neighborhood (and keep a garden in my tiny front yard), ran West Philly Plotland from 2015 to 2019, play guitar less often than I should, and binge TV shows with my lovely girlfriend (Amelia) and our four cats.

Contact

Research collaboration
tymoore@upenn.edu
Everything else
reductionist@gmail.com

Though I work for the University of Pennsylvania and sometimes use this site for research, the University and Penn Medicine are not responsible for anything on mooremetrics.com or its sub-domains. If you would like to collaborate with the Brain Behavior Laboratory on an IRB-approved study, write to tymoore@upenn.edu. For anything else, reductionist@gmail.com.