Templin is professor and E. F. Lindquist Chair in the Department of Psychological and Quantitative Foundations at the UI College of Education. He a member of the Educational Measurement and Statistics Program and the Center for Advanced Studies in Measurement and Statistics.Templin received his Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004, where he also received an M.S. in Statistics. He joined the faculty at UI  in January 2019 after serving  on the faculty at the University of Kansas, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the University of Georgia. The main focus of Templin's research is in the field of diagnostic classification models—psychometric models that seek to provide multiple reliable scores from educational and psychological assessments. He also studies Bayesian statistics, as applied in psychometrics, broadly. Templin’s research program has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Institute of Education Sciences and has been published in journals such as Psychometrika, Psychological Methods, Applied Psychological Measurement, and the Journal of Educational Measurement. Templin is currently outgoing co-editor of the Journal of Educational Measurement and has served as guest editor for the International Journal of Testing, and as Associate Editor for Psychometrika and Applied Psychological Measurement. He is co-author of the book Diagnostic Measurement: Theory, Methods, and Applications, which won the 2012 American Educational Research Association Division D Award for Significant Contribution to Educational Measurement and Research Methodology. Working in a real-world testing arena, Templin developed the scoring algorithm for with the Dynamic Learning Maps, an innovative assessment for students with severe disabilities. His innovative research in the field of diagnostic classification models has lead to him being listed as inventor of two U. S. Patents (#7,628,614 and #8,550,822).