Karen Nylund-Gibson is a Professor of Quantitative Methods at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on the development, evaluation, and application of advanced latent variable and mixture modeling with a particular emphasis on studying heterogeneity, developmental processes, and educational processes.
Her methodological work centers on latent class, latent profile, growth mixture, and latent transition models, including extensions for auxiliary variables, measurement invariance, missing data, and longitudinal designs. Substantively, she is especially interested in how quantitative methods can be used to more accurately represent complex and intersectional population patterns that are often obscured by traditional analytic approaches. She has served as principal investigator and co–principal investigator on multiple federally funded research and training grants, including awards from the National Science Foundation (2224786) and the Institute of Education Sciences (R305B220021), supporting both methodological innovation and large-scale training initiatives for early- and mid-career scholars.
Professor Nylund-Gibson is deeply engaged in graduate education and mentorship. She leads and teaches graduate courses in latent variable modeling, mixture modeling, and advanced quantitative methods, and directs national training programs that provide open-access instructional resources for researchers (https://mixture-modeling.netlify.app/) seeking to apply mixture models in equity-focused research. She regularly collaborates with interdisciplinary teams across education, psychology, and STEM education research, serving as a quantitative methodologist on a wide range of applied projects.