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 20 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.
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, Senior Data Analyst, joined OIRE in 2020. Laura supports institutional surveys, such as the Campus and Workplace Culture survey and the NSSE, analyzes and creates visualizations of student and course-related data, and completes ad-hoc requests.
Nathan Schwab, Senior Data Analyst, primarily works with faculty and staff data. Nathan provides data for federal reporting requirements like the HR component of the annual IPEDS survey and for UCD’s participation in national salary surveys like the Oklahoma Faculty Salary Survey and for the CUPA-HR’s (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources) annual salary survey. He also contributes to University of Colorado System reports like the Diversity Report and the Peer Salary data, and for any faculty and staff related reporting needed internally for UCD | AMC. He can help you with faculty and staff counts, employment trends, course instructor data, and most other employee-related analyses.
Naser Shekarian, Senior Data Analyst, joined OIRE in August 2025. He supports institutional decision-making through the analysis of student, faculty, and staff data, with a particular focus on predictive analytics, including retention and graduation outcomes, as well as reporting and statistical analysis.
Grace Lavelle, Data Analyst, Data Analyst, joined OIRE in 2023 after two years of work in admissions and student success. She coordinates and completes external guidebook surveys, analyzes and visualizes university-related data, and handles ad-hoc reporting. Grace also assists with maintaining and updating the Decision Support Toolkit (DSTk) and contributes to larger strategic initiatives, such as the Annual Program Check-in.
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.