Photo credit: University of Michigan, School of Public Health
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Morrel-Samuels received an MA in research methodology from the University of Chicago, an M. Phil. and a Ph.D. in experimental social psychology from Columbia University, and a Master of Science in Law from Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. He has served as an expert witness in employment law cases for more than 20 years, with work spanning three areas: the psychometrics of assessment design, statistical analysis of “big data” analytics, and workplace discrimination. He has more than 30 years’ experience designing and analyzing assessments for employees in government and large corporations.
Academic appointments include faculty positions at Columbia, and at University of Michigan in their Business School and their School of Public Health. He often served as a Lecturer at the University of Michigan, where he taught graduate classes on assessment design, statistics, and research methods. In addition he has held research positions at IBM, HP, University of Chicago, and Yale. His published articles have appeared in The Journal of Experimental Psychology, Behavioral Research Methods, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, California Management Review, Physician Executive, and Harvard Business Review, among others; (his first HBR article was on the design of workplace assessments, and his second was on web-based surveys.) Practical experience includes assessment services for non-profit organizations, (e.g., Blue Cross-Blue Shield), government agencies (e.g. DOJ), and Fortune 500 companies (e.g., FedEx, GM, California Edison, BofA, Xerox, Sprint, Sears, and Disney). He has authored four patented employee assessments and has been an expert resource for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Dr. Morrel-Samuels has extensive experience as an expert witness providing statistical analysis to assist triers of fact in lawsuits and arbitration pertaining to performance appraisals, surveys, and discrimination – especially employment discrimination. Roughly half of his time as an expert witness has been spent working for discrimination plaintiffs and half for discrimination defendants. For example, he provided statistical analyses that helped the AG of New Jersey, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and Time-Warner successfully defend themselves against discrimination charges; and he helped employees win discrimination suits against Washington State, the US Postal Service, and Microsoft, among others. He assisted the NAACP in its amicus brief in the Ricci discrimination case, testified as an expert witness at the ICC’s International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, developed a peer-reviewed method for measuring communality and typicality in Class Cert deliberations, and – after conducting a statistical analysis of effectiveness among Customs & Immigration Inspectors at the nation’s Ports of Entry – testified to Congress describing a new method for Flow Sampling and the preferred method for evaluating evidence of discrimination. He served as the EEOC’s expert witness in a landmark discrimination case – EEOC v. FAPS, (D.N.J. 2015). And he has successfully withstood all nine Daubert challenges filed against him.
In addition to his teaching responsibilities at University of Michigan he is also the founder and CEO of EMPA (SurveysForBusiness.com), a company that has designed and analyzed assessments for more than 7 million employees in over 70 countries.
Here is a link to a recent statistical analysis of discrimination conducted by Dr. Morrel-Samuels, which appears in full as the report’s appendix:
CONTACT
Dr. Palmer Morrel-Samuels, MA, M.Phil., MSc in Law, Ph.D.
Employee Motivation and Performance Assessment Inc. (EMPA)
210 Park Street
Chelsea, MI 48118
Phone: (734) 368-3348
Contact: palmer [at] umich [dot] edu (email formatted to avoid spambots)