About Us
Our mission is to support data-informed decision making across the institution by providing data and analyses that are accessible, objective and actionable. We engage with internal and external clients to help solve problems, support strategic initiatives and promote success within our campus community.
LEADERSHIP
Dave Deffenbacher, Assistant Vice Chancellor, provides technical and content expertise, reporting, and analysis of institutional data to internal and external audiences, with a particular focus on student and course data and state data reporting systems. He also represents the office on a number of committees and provides guidance to the university and other CU campuses regarding institutional data and data systems.
Paula Dickson, Executive Director, has been in institutional research with the University of Colorado Denver for more than 15 years. Her area of expertise is in student related data for both internal and external audiences. She focuses on graduation and retention analysis, working with the schools and colleges to understand their student populations, academic program review, as well as providing annual and term-based reports for all aspects of the student life cycle.
Irma Peralta, Associate Director, comes to the team with over 20 years in Student Affairs, sixteen of which have been in Financial Aid. She is committed to contributing useful information to university constituents that assists with decision-making conversations. She enjoys working with university departments to help assess student engagement and enrollment in order to provide better service. Her specialties are student-level data reporting, enrollment and retention analysis, enrollment and financial aid data analysis and the CU-Data reporting system.
David Doig, Director of Fiscal Analysis and Decision Support, joined the OIRE team in 2022 after 7 years in the CU Denver Budget and Fiscal Planning Office. David has ample experience working with student data and also brings expertise in budget and finance related content to the OIRE team. He specializes in creating self-service tools supporting strategic initiatives and serves as product manager for the Decision Support Toolkit platform.
DATA ANALYSTS AND REPORTING SPECIALISTS
Mindy Baker, Senior Data Analyst, has served in OIRE for almost 15 years. She primarily works with student related data for internal and external requestors, including serving as the online data request coordinator for the office. Mindy's area of expertise is in reporting at the state and federal level, serving as the IPEDS Keyholder and as one of the main data contacts for the Higher Learning Commission, the regional accreditors for the institution. Additional roles for Mindy include coordination and completion of CU system wide reports, such as the Budget Data Book, Diversity Report, and Regents Budget Data Book. She also works closely with areas such as Bursars, Financial Aid and the Registrar’s Office to process all academic structure requests for the Denver and Anschutz Medical Campuses.
Laura Perrigo, Data Analyst, joined OIRE in 2020. Laura completes CU Data and other reporting requests in addition to student and course related data analysis.
Nathan Schwab, Senior Data Analyst, primarily works with faculty and staff data and also helps out with OIRE’s internal data structures. He provides data to the Office of Equity for the annual Affirmative Action plan and for projects like the Denver Campus Faculty Salary Equity study, the HR sections of the federal IPEDS report, and various salary surveys. He can help you with faculty and staff counts, employment trends, course instructor data, and most other employee-related analyses.
Grace Lavelle, Data Analyst, joined OIRE in 2023 after 2 years of work in admissions and student success. Grace works to complete external guidebook surveys, analysis and visualization of university related data, and any ad-hoc reporting.
Tanisha Maredia, Data Analyst, joined OIRE in 2023. Tanisha works with reporting for CU data, student and course related data requests, ad-hoc reporting, analysis and visualization on dashboards. She also works with various US guidebook surveys for college rankings and maintains coordination for all these external publications.
IT STAFF
Jeff Quinones-Finch, Senior Systems Analyst, serves as the department’s database and web technology analyst. Jeff coordinates and supports dataflow into OIRE’s central data warehouse, maintenance of internal and web-based applications, and publication of datasets to OIRE’s website and other analytical toolkits.