Loren Collingwood, Ph.D.
Loren has visited all 50 states and traveled to more than 40 countries throughout the world. He particularly loves the Patagonian region of Argentina and Chile. In his free time, Loren trains for ironman triathlons and other endurance events and enjoys going on mountain walks with his dog, Gerry, and wife, Sarah Dreier, who is also a professor of political science at University of New Mexico.
My Story
Loren Collingwood, Ph.D., is CEO and founder of Collingwood Research. Born in Balquhidder, Scotland, Loren moved to Humboldt County, CA, at age 3. Loren holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from University of Washington where he focused on race and ethnic politics and applied statistics. He holds a B.A. in psychology from California State University, Chico, where he played on the school's soccer team. He is also Associate Professor of Political Science at University of New Mexico. Loren is the author of 40 peer reviewed articles, a dozen book chapters, and two books with Oxford University Press: Campaigning in a Racially Diversifying America: When and How Cross-Racial Electoral Mobilization Works; and Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge. Substantively, Loren is an expert in campaigns and elections, Latino politics, public opinion, and immigration politics.
Loren has nearly 20 years of consulting experience beginning his research career at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, located in Washington, DC, in 2003. Between 2007-2012, he served as a senior analyst at the Washington Poll in Seattle, WA, where he handled all aspects of the survey research process. Loren is an expert in complex sample design, most notably designing and implementing proprietary software for the National Democratic Institute’s (NDI) survey operations in Iraq from 2017-2019.
Loren has a long-running interest in demography and elections and leads the firm’s map drawing, redistricting, racially polarized voting, and demographic services offerings. From 2018-2020, Loren served as an expert in the Section 2 Voting Rights case, NAACP vs. East Ramapo Central School District, No. 17 Civ. 8943 (S.D.N.Y.), where he used statistical software eiCompare and WRU to implement Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) to identify the racial/ethnic demographics of voters and estimate candidate preference by race using ecological data. He also serves as an expert in LULAC vs. Pate and is presently retained by several firms for his expert work.
Loren is an expert in handling large datasets, namely voter files, and is experienced in record linkage, geocoding, SQL programming, and statistical programming. He is the author of the R package, Rvoterdistance, which efficiently locates individual voters’ nearest polling locations/drop boxes using underlying C++ code mixed with GIS. In the summer of 2020, Loren led University of Washington’s E-science Data Science for Social Good project on voting rights in which he along with Matt Barreto of UCLA and four Ph.D. students further developed eiCompare -- software used in the assessment of racially polarized voting and electoral performance analysis of proposed voting maps. Loren also directs the firm’s voter modeling offerings, having developed vote propensity and Spanish language models for firms such as Latino Decisions, L2, and Catalist. He is one of the main co-authors of the R package, RTextTools, a supervised machine learning program for text data.
Loren has worked in dozens of countries around the world, including Central and South America, Western Africa, Central Europe, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, and in most regions across the United States. Loren has experience working in redistricting or election law in Northern and Southern California, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Illinois, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Washington State, and Wisconsin. Loren has worked with the Inland Empire Funding Alliance in Southern California, West Contra Costa Unified School District, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), Roswell NM School District, the Department of Justice, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, LatinoJustice PRLDEF, FairMaps Coalition, MALDEF, Campaign Legal Center, ACLU, and various law firms working with the NAACP, and many consulting firms relying on his expertise.