Linda M Collins

Dr. Collins’s 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 also collaborating on development of methods for decision-making based on the results of an optimization trial; optimizing interventions for cost-effectiveness; and optimizing adaptive interventions. 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 100 invited presentations on MOST worldwide. Among the honors she has received are a Fulbright Specialist grant, the President’s Award from the Society for Prevention Research, and the 2020 Valkhov Chair from Radboud University Medical Centre in The Netherlands. Dr. Collins earned her B.A. from the University of Connecticut and her Ph.D. from the University of Southern California (USC). Before joining New York University she held faculty positions at USC and Penn State.