Sarah Allred, PhD, is Associate Professor in Psychology at Rutgers University – Camden, and came to the University in 2009 after three years of postdoctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Allred earned her Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the University of Washington. She also holds a BS in Applied Physics with minors in mathematics and philosophy from Brigham Young University in Utah.
For her primary research on the relationship between visual perception and memory, Dr. Allred received the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award. She also teaches courses on research methods, experimental psychology, and perception and evolutionary psychology; she is a past recipient of both the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence and the Presidential Teaching Award.
Broadly, Allred’s academic research approach is to find sensible and useful interpretations of large and noisy data sets through computational and statistical modeling techniques. This includes research projects: (1) Bayesian modeling of publicly available local area health data (funded by RWJF and UW-Madison ); (2) Predicting an individual’s health from objective and subjective measures of neighborhood quality; (3) How population vs county-based analysis of data affects the utility of Community Health Needs Assessments; (4) Leveraging big data to benefit small communities (funded by RWJF).