Biography
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.
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
Current external funding includes a NIDA grant awarded to Dr. Lanza, titled “Promoting Rapid Uptake of Multilevel Latent Class Modeling via Best Practices: Investigating Heterogeneity in Daily Substance Use Patterns” (R01-DA057588). Additionally, Dr. Lanza Co-directs with Dr. Jennifer Maggs the long-standing Prevention and Methodology Training Program (T32-DA017629), which has trained more than 100 pre- and post-doctoral research fellows in advancing substance use research through innovative methods.
Latent class analysis; time-varying effect modeling; longitudinal methods; intensive longitudinal data; etiology of health risk behaviors.
Research Interests
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
Recent Publications
- Lanza, S. T., & Hochgraf, A. K. (2026). Time-varying effect modeling to address novel questions in developmental research. In D. M. Teti, H. H. Cleveland, & K. L. Rulison (Eds.), Handbook of Research Methods in Developmental Science (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
- Stull, S. W., Marsch, L. A., & Lanza, S. T. (2025). Daily profiles of nondrug reward and their association with daily outcomes for people in recovery from opioid use disorder: An application of latent profile analysis applied to intensive longitudinal data. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 271, 112646. doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2025.112646
- Lanza, S. T., Linden-Carmichael, A. N., Wang, D., Bhandari, S., & Stull, S. W. (2024). A personalized data dashboard to improve compliance with ecological momentary assessments in college students: Protocol for a study to compare EMA as usual to EMA with a data dashboard deployed in a micro-randomized trial. JMIR Research Protocols, 13(1). DOI: 10.2196/57664 PMCID: PMC11589493
- Lanza, S. T., Whetzel, C., & Bhandari, S. (2024). Health and well-being among United States college students during the COVID-19 pandemic: A daily diary study. Interactive Journal of Medical Research, 13e45689. http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/45689 PMCID: PMC11380054
- Bray, B. C., Layland, E. K., Stull, S. W., Vasilenko, S. A., & Lanza, S. T. (2022). Estimating the effects of a complex, multidimensional moderator: An example of latent class moderation to examine differential intervention effects of substance use services. Prevention Science, 24, 493-504. doi: 10.1007/s11121-022-01448-3. PMCID: PMC10090219