Assistant Director, Analytics & Insights (Hybrid) - Office of Institutional Effectiveness

Position Summary

The Office of Institutional Effectiveness (IE) partners with academic leaders to deliver insights, guide strategy, and foster a data-informed culture that drives institutional excellence and continuous improvement. IE serves as a strategic resource for WashU’s academic mission and priorities. Our work is grounded in our team values of people, excellence, impact and growth.

The Assistant Director of Analytics & Insights provides strategic and tactical support for institutional planning, assessment, and decision-making within the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, in close partnership with the Senior Director of Analytics and Insights. This position leads analytic projects, oversees the development of institutional deliverables, and ensures the accuracy, integrity, and appropriate use of institutional data. The assistant director will manage the analytic team, including setting project priorities, coaching team members, and ensure high-quality, timely analytic deliverables.

This role collaborates with academic and administrative units to help frame key institutional questions, apply appropriate analytic approaches, and deliver insights that inform strategy, accreditation, resource allocation and continuous improvement.

The Assistant Director of Analytics & Insights also contributes to advancing IE’s decision support strategy and supports WashU’s broader data governance effort by promoting practices that enhance data access, quality, and clarity for decision-makers. In addition, this role helps strengthen analytics capacity within the IE team through shared tools, training, and collaborative learning.

Primary Duties & Responsibilities

Analytics, Institutional Research, and Decision Support

• Lead analytic and institutional research projects that inform institutional priorities, including enrollment, retention, graduation outcomes, student academic experience, and institutional performance.
• Conduct statistical analyses to support strategic planning, academic program evaluation, and institutional initiatives.
• Develop and apply analytic frameworks to evaluate institutional policies, interventions, and programs.
• Apply advanced analytic methods, including predictive analytics and machine learning where appropriate, to support institutional priorities such as enrollment forecasting, student success initiatives, and program evaluation.
• Oversee production of surveys, reports, and dashboards used by senior leadership, schools, and administrative units.
• Ensure consistency and accuracy across institutional reporting.
• Support preparation of materials for executive leadership, governance bodies and external interest holders by translating findings into clear, decision-relevant insights.
• Utilize statistical and analytic tools (e.g., R, Python, SQL) and business intelligence platforms for analysis, reporting, and visualization.
• Advance reproducible analytic workflows and standardized reporting processes.

Team Leadership and Project Management

• Collaborate with the Senior Director and Associate Provost to advance IE’s analytic and decision support strategy in alignment with institutional priorities.
• Supervise, mentor, and develop analytic staff, fostering a collaborative, agile, and high-performing team environment.
• Establish and uphold standards for analytic rigor, documentation, and reproducibility across the team.
• Manage analytic project prioritization, timelines, and workflows to align with institutional priorities and reporting requirements.

Stakeholder Engagement and Consultation

• Partner with academic and administrative leaders to define key questions and align analytic and institutional research efforts with strategic and operational needs.
• Translate complex analyses into clear findings and actionable recommendations.
• Provide expert guidance on the interpretation, limitations, and appropriate use of institutional data.
• Maintain partnerships with peer institutions to enable sharing of peer data and sharing of best practices.