Linda Collins (psychologist)
Linda M. Collins is an American psychologist who uses math and statistics to study health. She is a professor of global public health at New York University.
She earned a BA in psychology from the University of Connecticut and a PhD in quantitative psychology from the University of Southern California. She has taught at USC and Penn State, and now works at NYU in the global public health department.
Collins is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. She has led two major professional groups as president: the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology and the Society for Prevention Research.
She is best known for the Multiphase Optimization Strategy (MOST). MOST blends ideas from engineering, psychology, statistics, health economics, and decision making to design better health programs that work well, cost less, reach more people, and are easier to scale. She has used MOST in HIV prevention, helping people quit smoking, reducing heavy drinking on college campuses, and weight loss.
Her research has been funded by agencies like NIDA, NIAAA, NCI, NIDDK, and the NSF. She has published many studies across psychology, medicine, and engineering and has given more than 150 invited talks about MOST worldwide. With Dr. Kate Guastaferro, she developed two online courses on intervention optimization and MOST.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:47 (CET).