Bridget McHugh, PhD

Bridget McHugh, PhD, is the Program Director for the Assessment Program. Dr. McHugh and her team pride themselves on creating valid and reliable high stakes written assessments for employees and students in the skilled trades. As Program Director, Dr. McHugh runs the testing program for public secondary career technical education courses in partnership with the Ohio Department of Education. This program administers pre-training and post-training assessments for over 300 career tech courses to 150,000 students each year, and provides students with the opportunity to gain post-secondary class credits for CTAG courses. In addition, Dr. McHugh works in credentialing, both as an accreditation application reviewer for the Institute for Credentialing Excellence, and as a consultant to credentialing organizations.

Dr. McHugh is an avid scientist-practitioner, with expertise in multilevel and longitudinal modeling and issues with employee online communication. She’s utilized this expertise to explore urgent societal issues, such as how the COVID-19 closures effected workforce development training; online workplace cyberbullying’s impact on employees; gender-based task segregation in engineering; the practical application of DIF analysis techniques to job analysis data; and the longitudinal effects of online risk exposure and parental interventions on teens’ week to week emotional and psychological health. 

While earning her PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, she contributed to research on emotional intelligence. She also studied how social media can introduce discrimination to employee selection.

Dr. McHugh currently works in a hybrid mode from the greater DC area. When she’s not in the office, she enjoys going on nature hikes with her husband, playing Pokémon Go, and spending far too much time on Pinterest.