Welcome to the ALPHA Lab!

The Assessment, Learning, and Prediction for Health Analytics (ALPHA) Lab will open in Fall 2026 within the Department of Psychology and the Quantitative Psychology Ph.D. Program at the University of Notre Dame. The lab is under the direction of Oscar Gonzalez, Ph.D.

At the ALPHA Lab, we’re driven by a central question: How can we advance the methods of psychological science to better understand, and ultimately improve, health and prevention outcomes?

Our research focuses on the development of new statistical and computational methodologies that strengthen the scientific foundations of health-related research. We design and test methods for:

Smiling researcher in a white lab coat points to a mediation model (X->M->Y, X->Y) on a screen. A clipboard checklist, brain icon, and line graph are also visible. A laptop sits on the wooden desk.
This illustration was created by Oscar Gonzalez using ChatGPT
  • Assessment, to improve how we measure psychological constructs and screen for conditions, ensuring that these tools work equivalently and fairly across diverse populations.
  • Mediation analysis, to refine how researchers identify mechanisms of change in prevention and intervention studies.
  • Machine learning, to develop interpretable and fair models that complement and extend traditional approaches in psychological research.

By integrating ideas from psychometrics, causal inference, and data science, our goal is to make psychological research more precise, transparent, and equitable. Through methodological innovation, the ALPHA Lab aims to contribute to the advancement of health and prevention science, helping researchers ask sharper questions and draw stronger conclusions.