Bill Altermatt, Ph.D.

Assistant Director, Data Science

Bill Altermatt, Ph.D., is a data scientist who works with both the Utah Education Policy Center (UEPC) Evaluation team and the Bridgeworks School Improvement Team to help with research design, data transformation and analysis, and the visualization and interpretation of results.

Bill believes that people make better decisions when they use tools that reveal patterns: trends over time, differences between groups, associations among variables, etc. Used correctly, these tools broaden and deepen our understanding of the systems we are trying to improve and enable us to deploy our resources where they will do the most good.

Bill has worked in higher education for over 20 years as a professor of psychology, associate dean, and institutional researcher. For 18 years, he taught courses in research design and statistics and supervised hundreds of student research projects using a variety of methods including surveys, laboratory and field experiments, and content analysis. As an advanced R programmer, he has extensive experience accessing and maintaining secure databases, wrangling messy data, transforming and reclassifying data using regular expressions, modeling data using predictive analytics and machine learning, and visualizing the results in a way that is clear, precise, and accessible. Bill believes that research must promote autonomy, well-being, and equity for participants. He takes great care to protect the security of the confidential data with which he has been entrusted.

Bill holds a Ph.D. in social psychology with a minor in quantitative methods from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds a B.A. from Millersville University of Pennsylvania with a major in psychology.