He is a professor of quantitative psychology at the University of North Carolina, where he is also a faculty member at the Center for Developmental Science.
He is the coauthor of Latent Curve Models: A Structural Equation Perspective (with Ken Bollen) and is known broadly in the social sciences for teaching and research on the measurement and analysis of longitudinal data.
In 2008, he cofounded Curran–Bauer Analytics, a consulting firm based in Durham, North Carolina.
In addition, as a principal investigator on several grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, he conducts applied research in developmental psychopathology in general and on the risk factors of adolescent substance use in particular.
He has published extensively in books and peer-reviewed journals and has been cited in the scholarly literature more than 40,000 times.