Chaitra M. Hardison

Chaitra M. Hardison (she/her) is a senior behavioral scientist at RAND and a professor of policy analysis at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research focuses on the knowledge, skills, and abilities required in the workplace and identifying how best to select, train, and educate personnel to be successful on the job. Her work for the Air Force has explored drivers of cyber workforce retention; Aircrew Flight Equipment proficiency issues; manpower planning and compensation for remotely piloted aircraft personnel; stress and dissatisfaction in the ICBM and RPA communities; defining cross-cultural, battlefield, and second language training needs; and validity, fairness, and bias of the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test. Work for the Army includes evaluating the Army Combat Fitness Test and its impacts on age, gender, race, and MOS recruitment; high-performance indicators for close-combat forces. Work for the Department of Defense has explored the education credential tiering policy for predicting enlisted attrition, the services efforts to establish gender-neutral standards in ground combat occupations, ways to increase recruitment of women, the pros and cons of 360-degree feedback assessments in the military, and using personality tests to predict enlisted attrition. Other past work includes designing and validating critical thinking value-added assessments for use in higher-education institutions and the evaluation of fairness, diversity, and illegal discrimination in educational and workplace settings. Hardison holds a Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.