Ph.D. Prep Panel
Practical Realities of Running Experiments and How They Shape Your Methods
Friday, April 10 | 10:30 AM – 11:45 AM ET
Designing an experiment on paper is only half the job. Once you are in the lab or working with student participants, the everyday realities start to shape what your study can actually look like. Managing lab staff, coordinating participant flow, handling no-shows, troubleshooting technology problems, and keeping the procedure consistent all influence the quality of your data and the strength of your inferences. These practical details are not separate from your methodological choices. They determine whether you can truly implement random assignment, maintain experimental control, deliver manipulations as intended, and protect the integrity of your measures. Learning how to anticipate and manage these day to day issues helps you run cleaner studies, make more defensible methodological claims, and build a smoother path from your design to your conclusions.
Dr. Anand van Zelderen
Biography
Anand van Zelderen is an Assistant Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Business at SKEMA Business School. His research examines the socio-emotional costs that surface when employees interact with autonomous AI agents. A pioneer in experimental management research, he is among the first to develop synthetic field studies, an approach that integrates AI and Virtual Reality to create lifelike organizational simulations that capture real behaviors while preserving experimental control. To democratize access to these tools, he founded the Openverse Open Science Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration of more than 70 scholars around the world. Through his research and education, Anand aims to shape a human-centric future of work where emerging technologies are integrated ethically, inclusively, and sustainably into organizations and society.
Biography
Dorothy R. Carter is an Associate Professor of Management in the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Her research seeks to uncover the factors that enable teams and larger collectives to tackle complex challenges. Her research on leadership and teamwork has appeared in multiple journals within the organizational sciences, including Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, American Psychologist, and The Leadership Quarterly, as well as in interdisciplinary publication outlets. She has received over $10 million in funding as Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator from national agencies including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Army Research Institute (ARI), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She has received multiple research awards including the 2017 Alvah H. Chapman Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Academy of Management’s (AoM) Network of Leadership Scholars (NLS), the 2019 Rising Star in Leadership Research Award from the AoM’s NLS, the 2020 Charles B. Knapp Early Career Scholar in the Social Sciences Award from the University of Georgia (UGA), and the 2023 Early Career Award from the Interdisciplinary Network for Groups Research (INGRoup). Dr. Carter currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Psychology Review, and Journal of Business and Psychology. She is a co-author on a forthcoming National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report commissioned by the National Institutes of Health focused on best practices for supporting and evaluating team science. Dr. Carter earned her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA and her B.S. degree in Psychology from Wright State University in Dayton, OH.
Dr. Dorothy Carter
