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Stephanie Lanza
Professor of Biobehavioral Health
Professor of Human Development and Family Studies (courtesy)
Edna P. Bennett Faculty Fellow in Prevention Research
Summary Statement

Stephanie Lanza's career is devoted to advancing research in behavioral health through the development and application of innovative quantitative methods; much of her work leverages intensive longitudinal methods and focuses on young adult substance use behavior.

Department
  • Biobehavioral Health - BBH
  • Research and Labs
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Education
  • The Pennsylvania State University, PhD, Human Development and Family Studies, 2003
Currently Accepting Graduate Students
Phone
Office Address
129 Biobehavioral Health Building
University Park, PA 16802
Interests
  • Substance use behavior in daily life among adolescents and young adults
  • Finite mixture modeling, including innovations in latent class analysis, so that researchers can discover and understand hidden subgroups in their data
  • Time-varying effect models to study substance use behavior developmentally and in real time/daily life
  • Leveraging new technologies and methods to understand substance use behaviors in daily life based on intensive longitudinal assessment
Professional Experience

Stephanie's career is devoted to advancing research in behavioral health through the development and application of innovative quantitative methods. She focuses this work in two key areas. First, she works on extensions to latent class analysis, including multilevel latent class analysis, so that researchers can discover hidden subgroups or types of moments in their data and understand their antecedents and consequences. Second, she focuses on the application and dissemination of time-varying effect models, which enable scientists to examine regression coefficients as a continuous function of age or time, often using intensive longitudinal data.

Grants and Research Projects

Latent class analysis; time-varying effect modeling; longitudinal methods; intensive longitudinal data; etiology of health risk behaviors.

Publications