I am the director of Mental Health Data Science in the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) and Columbia University psychiatry department where I oversee a team of 13 biostatisticians collaborating on predominately NIH funded research projects related to psychiatry. I have worked extensively with modeling complex multilevel and multimodal data on a wide array of psychosocial public health and psychiatric research questions in both clinical studies and large epidemiologic studies (over 260 total journal publications). My biostatistical expertise includes latent variable modeling (e.g. factor analysis, item response theory, latent class models, structural equation modeling), spatial data modeling (e.g. disease mapping), and longitudinal data analysis including the class of longitudinal models commonly called growth curve mixture models. I received a Ph.D. (1998) from the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University, and a B.S. (1993) in mathematics from Truman State University. Before moving to Columbia University in 2010, I was on faculty in Biostatistics in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota. Link to my blog about Mental Health Data Science.