Delwin Carter, a doctoral student in the Department of Education, has had all kinds of notable successes in his years at UCSB’s Gevirtz School. He’s won an Alumni Fellowship Award for Teaching and Mentoring. He was an elected official as part of the Graduate Students Association in Education. He’s the co-author of over 16 journal articles, delivered papers at both AERA and APA, and is the project supervisor of the Longitudinal Mixture Modeling Research Laboratory.
What people might not know about him is he’s also an accomplished musician, often in support of his wife, recording artist Terrill. Indeed, “The One,” the latest single from her recent debut album Feels Like This, is his composition.
Not only did he write the smooth slice of R&B, he put it all together himself on GarageBand in his bedroom, he admits. He figured at the time it would be a great calling card for his wife, but when the album’s eventual producer and six-time BMI award winner Preston Glass (famed for his work with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, and Earth, Wind & Fire, to name only a few) heard it, he exclaimed, “This is great as it is!” (Well, actually, ever-striving to make their music even better, Carter bought a Fender bass guitar and put down the licks to improve on the electronic sound in GarageBand even though the production team didn’t ask for it.)
Carter is quick to put the spotlight back on his partner, though. “I am honored to be able to work with Terrill, he is quick to add. “She has a voice that is velvet and a stage presence that can quiet a crowd.”
Then again, it was Carter who came up with the idea for—and then filmed and edited—the video for “The One.” That might not come as a surprise to GGSE’ers with good memories, as Delwin worked as a communications assistant creating videos for the School back in 2017-18. “I bought a fish-eye lens for a different look,” he says, “and then we went out around Santa Barbara, from campus to State Street, to shoot the video.”
“Delwin is the machine behind the machine,” Terrill points out. “When everything looks beautiful, sparkling, and shiny in front of the camera, just know it’s all because Delwin is working his magic behind the scenes.”
Possessing such musical and artistic chops might not be what the world would expect from someone who also developed a novel technique to estimate effect sizes in mixture modeling and has established measurement equivalence among various health related scales for underrepresented populations.
Delwin’s current research involves mixture modeling with an emphasis in examining the consequences of latent transition analysis modeling techniques such as random intercepts latent transition analysis, how different methods may impact the power and precision of parameter estimates, and provide insights to applied researchers that can improve the accuracy of their results and inferences. And he promises that dissertation is going to happen.
“I feel so fortunate to have Karen Nylund-Gibson as my advisor,” he says. “Karen is supportive, kind, and constantly learning how to be a better at everything she does. She has developed unparalleled skills of patience having to have me as her advisee! In all seriousness, Karen is kindhearted, she has an innate understanding of how to expertly scaffold everyone she mentors, and implicitly knows how to maximize the performance of her mentees.”
