Alicia D. Simmons is a Vice President at Hart Research Associates, joining the firm in 2021. She earned her MA and PhD in sociology at Stanford University, and her BA in sociology from Hartwick College.
Alicia has over twenty-years of experience conducting social research, and her work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. She is an expert in a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods, and her toolkit includes advanced statistical techniques such as multiple regressions, analysis of variance, factor analysis, and cluster analysis. Alicia has a particular fondness for conducting surveys, experiments, and content analyses of audio/visual messages. Many of her projects are in the issue advocacy, politics, media, and education sectors.
In addition to her work at Hart, Alicia is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Colgate University, teaching classes such as Black Communities, Race and Crime, and Media and Politics. Her academic research uses a social psychological lens to study the intersections of media, race, and politics in the United States. She is currently writing a book about the nature and consequences of news coverage about police killings of unarmed Black men.
When she is not researching social life, Alicia likes to spend time completing jigsaw puzzles and playing games with family and friends.