University Park’s Dr. Linda Collins is a world-renowned, groundbreaking researcher who is dedicating her career to tackling social, behavioral and health challenges. She’s served as a professor of human development and family studies since 1994, is a professor of statistics and is the director of the internationally acclaimed Methodology Center at Penn State, which brings together top scientists and the best ideas to help prevent serious health problems.

However, what really sets Dr. Collins apart is her utmost devotion to addressing the prevention of drug abuse, obesity, HIV and mental health problems. Her current work draws on engineering concepts to optimize health interventions, helping treatments for behavioral problems (like smoking, drug abuse and risky sex) become more effective and more efficient. Dr. Collins’ experimental work also focuses on models that allow researchers to uncover hidden population subgroups so that interventions can be directed at people most in need.

Individuals like Dr. Collins are helping Penn State stand apart as a leading research institution. Simply put, her colleagues and the research community call her approaches “revolutionary,” and describe her as a “brilliant, curious, open-minded and hardworking” embodiment of what it means to be a Penn Stater, devoted to community building, giving back to society and rigorous scholarship.

In 2000, Dr. Collins received the Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for the Social and Behavioral Sciences; in 2004, she received the President’s Award of the Society for Prevention Research and; in 2011, she received the Evan G. and Helen G. Pattishall Outstanding Research Achievement Award from the College of Health and Human Development. She’s a mentor to young scientists, and her work has been published in countless journals.

Thanks in no small part to her efforts, the approaches she has developed are becoming widespread among health and social sciences communities, and Methodology Center software (for performing these analyses) has been utilized by researchers worldwide.

To learn more about Dr. Collins and the Methodology Center, visit http://methodology.psu.edu/.