Linda Collins

Dr. Collins is Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Professor of Biostatistics, and Director of the Center for Advancement and Dissemination of Intervention Optimization (CADIO) at New York University’s School of Global Public Health. Her interests are focused on development, dissemination, and application of the multiphase optimization strategy (MOST), an innovative methodological framework for optimizing and evaluating interventions in public health, education, criminal justice, and many other fields. MOST integrates ideas from engineering, behavioral science, multivariate statistics, health economics, and decision analysis. The objective of MOST is to improve intervention effectiveness, affordability, scalability, and
efficiency, balancing these strategically to achieve intervention EASE. Dr. Collins has collaborated on research applying MOST in a range of areas, including HIV, smoking cessation,
prevention of excessive alcohol use in college students, and weight loss. She is currently also collaborating on development of methods for optimization of adaptive interventions; decision- making based on the results of an optimization trial; and optimizing interventions for value- efficiency. Her research has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, and the National Science Foundation. Dr. Collins’s publications have appeared in journals in the behavioral sciences, quantitative methodology, medicine, and engineering. She has given more than 150 invited presentations on MOST worldwide. With co-author Dr. Kate Guastaferro, she has developed a course on intervention optimization on the Coursera platform.