I am a Statistician at RAND and head of the Rand Statistical Consulting Service. Here are my colleagues in the RAND Statistics group. This is my RAND Home Page . I am located in RAND's Pittsburgh office right between the Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Here are my address and phone number. You can email me at matt at rand dot org. Before joining Rand's Pittsburgh office in 2005, I worked for 5.5 years at RAND's Santa Monica headquarters. From 1997-1999 I held a joint appointment with the National Institute of Statistical Sciences and AT&T Labs - Research Look up my former colleagues at AT&T on the statistics research page. In 1997, I graduated from the University of Waterloo , Ontario,  in Statistics.

Update

I am currently spending a sabbatical at the German Institute for economic analysis (DIW) in Berlin, Germany. The DIW hosts the longest running household panel in Germany, SOEP. The sabbatical has been made possible in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB).

Research Interests:

My research interests reflect the diverse research environment at RAND. I am interested in the methodology of web surveys and surveys in general. For example, for web surveys which are often non probability samples the question arises whether it is possible to adjust for selection through the use of additional lifestyle questions that capture the difference between online and offline population. As a result of my sabbatical with the SOEP group in Berlin, Germany, I have also started to work more generally on methodological issues in panel surveys.

If patients do not understand what health providers are trying to tell them (e.g., the doctor may not explain issues in simple terms) they may suffer health consequences later in life not because they chose not to follow doctor's instructions, but simply because they did not understand what to do. We are interested in whether and which components of health literacy is predictive of health outcomes such as cardiovascular disease.

I have used propensity scoring approaches in several different domains, including in the context of selectivity of web surveys, racial inequities in the way the US death penalty is prosecuted, and whether bullying and victimization of teenagers is related to delinquent behavior.

When the opportunity arises I enjoy programming. Much of my early programming was in C/C++ (e.g. software for the analysis of computer experiments), but because of time constraints I have lately focused on add-on programs in stata that seamlessly integrate with existing stata commands. One highlight was a plugin of the data mining technique "boosting" (programmed from scratch in C++) into stata.

Some Current Projects:

• The effect of health literacy on cardiovascular disease
• The effect of collecting biomarkers in surveys on representation and selectivity
• Methodological issues in household panel surveys
• Validation of a PROMIS scales in the American Life Panel
• Graph comprehension and graph preferences

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