Dr. Zachary K. Collier, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and the program chair of the Educational Statistics and Research Methods Program at the University of Delaware. He is also a resident faculty member at the Data Science Institute and at the Center for Research in Education and Social Policy (CRESP), and a 2019 High-Performance Computing Early Career Awardee. Dr. Collier is also the director of the Methods for Unstructured and Difficult to use Data (MUDD) Lab.

Dr. Collier’s area of expertise is the advancement and application of finite mixture modeling, particularly latent class and profile analyses. He also seeks to develop effective and efficient heuristic optimization data-mining-type search algorithms in structural equation modeling and propensity score analysis for emerging data intensive applications in education and social policy. Dr. Collier’s research seeks to address problems associated with non-random attrition, incomplete longitudinal data, and selection bias.