Each year, the Diverse: Issues in Higher Education magazine honors scholars from around the U.S. who are changing academia through teaching, research, and service. This week, they announced their 2025 class of scholars, which features UConn faculty member Zachary K. Collier.

An assistant professor in the Neag School of Education’s Department of Educational Psychology, Collier teaches in the Research Methods, Measurement, and Evaluation (RMME) programs. He joined the Neag School faculty in Fall 2023 and is a groundbreaking researcher in the fields of causal data mining and missing data analysis.

“I found out about the award the week of Thanksgiving,” Collier says. “My folks were visiting for the holidays when I checked my email, and I jumped up when I realized I won the award. It was also my birthday, so it was everything wonderful all at once.”

Diverse has been recognizing emerging scholars since 2001, selecting 15 each year who have made broad impacts on higher education, no matter their areas of expertise. According to the magazine, each scholar is selected based on research, educational background, publishing record, teaching record, competitiveness in field of study, and uniqueness of field of study. Honorees are chosen from a pool of hundreds recommended by various scholars, department chairs, university public information officers, and others.

“I congratulate Dr. Collier on this phenomenal honor,” says Neag School Dean Jason G. Irizarry. “It’s wonderful to see an accomplished, early-career scholar receive well-deserved national recognition for his work. Zach’s research is cutting edge and moving the field forward in necessary ways. We are fortunate to have him as a member of the Neag School community, and we will continue to follow his professional trajectory with great anticipation.”

Casual data mining – Collier’s area of expertise – bridges two things: traditional causal frameworks that help determine cause and effect relationships in research studies and modeling them with modern data mining methods. He originally entered this field focusing on propensity score analysis, which is a technique for determining cause and effect in observational studies. Collier innovatively applied data mining to that tried-and-true causal framework by looking at new ways to estimate propensity scores and enhance past approaches to propensity score analysis.

“Propensity scores are traditionally the starting point for answering questions like, ‘What is the average effect of this intervention on a student’s outcome?’,” he says.

I congratulate Dr. Collier on this phenomenal honor. It’s wonderful to see an accomplished, early-career scholar receive well-deserved national recognition for his work. — Dean Jason G. Irizarry

Collier started to explore different data mining methods around 2016, landing on an artificial neural network approach, which allows computers to mimic how the human brain processes information and reach much more reliable conclusions in complex situations. This was a completely new process for estimating propensity scores, breaking ground in the field.

“I found that I was getting much more accurate estimates of propensity scores, and it was a lot more flexible than the regression models we had been using,” Collier says.

At the end of the day, Collier wants researchers to know that their data-driven decisions and study results are based on the most valid and reliable information possible. This level of accuracy can have transformative impacts on how research findings are applied to areas of everyday life.

However, Collier began his career as a special education teacher before discovering his love for analysis. He says a research project he worked on the summer before his senior year at Winthrop University is what initially sparked his interest in quantitative research methods. He went on to receive his master’s and Ph.D. in measurement and statistics from the University of Florida but says all his research assistantships during his studies were education focused.

When he became a faculty member at the University of Delaware, Collier says he began to also apply his research to public health topics.

“Public health researchers began reaching out to me, explaining that they had observational data and needed an expert in propensity score analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of their treatments,” Collier says. “It was essentially the same type of modeling I had been doing — whether it’s a medical treatment or an educational intervention, the goal is still to determine its impact.”

So, he collaborated on an HIV prevention project. What started as one research article turned into a new grant and, he says, kept building from there. He still works with the same research team – while graduate students on the team have changed over the years as they complete their degrees, the leaders are still the same health researchers who contacted him when he was a first-year professor.

Public health researchers began reaching out to me, explaining that they had observational data and needed an expert in propensity score analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of their treatments. … whether it’s a medical treatment or an educational intervention, the goal is still to determine its impact. — Zachary K. Collier

“Early on, I questioned how broadly this new approach to estimating propensity scores could be applied,” he says. “It almost became a challenge to find scenarios where this technique wouldn’t outperform traditional methods — but in nearly every case I tested, it proved superior.”

Currently, Collier is working on two grant-funded projects: a $3.75 million grant from the National Institutes of Health examining a new intervention program for people in recovery from opioid use disorder, and a $75,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation to explore how special education policies can be improved to introduce anti-racist practices and tackle the overrepresentation of minorities in special education classes.

“Dr. Collier’s scholarship is at the cutting edge of casual data mining,” says Neag School professor and RMME Programs coordinator Bianca Montrosse-Moorhead. “He is an exceptional scholar, teacher, and mentor. He has made a huge impact on the field, School, and students. So, it is wonderful to see his early career contributions recognized. Congratulations!”

Though it’s still early in his career, as Montrosse-Moorhead notes, Collier has already had a positive influence on his field and on programs that improve the lives of students and adults across the country, leading to his recognition as a 2025 Emerging Scholar. Through it all, he credits UConn with helping him reach new heights in his academic journey.

“One of the things I enjoy the most about UConn is the other faculty in the research methods programs,” he says. “At any given moment, I can walk past another scholar who is conducting research methods research in a completely different area than mine. It has been fascinating to think about how we can collaborate.”

One such collaboration has led to Collier and colleague Eric Loken being accepted to lead a symposium at the 2025 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting in April. The event is the largest education research conference in the nation, drawing more than 15,000 attendees each year.

“That would not have been possible if I had not been here at UConn with these amazing students and faculty,” Collier says.