Dr. Nathan (David) Pifer researches sports analytics, the use of data and statistical methods to help sport organizations and individuals make better decisions. He is primarily concerned with variables related to on-field/on-court team, player, and coach performance, and how analytics can help these parties enhance their decision-making by overcoming errant traditions, biases, and heuristics.
Dr. Pifer’s work has been published in the Journal of Sports Economics, the Journal of Sports Analytics, the Journal of Sport Management, and other notable journals and books. He has also developed and taught sports analytics classes at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Prior to arriving at Florida State, Dr. Pifer spent four years as an assistant professor at Texas Tech University, where he developed a sports analytics curriculum and established an internship pipeline between the sport management and athletics departments. He obtained his PhD from the University of Georgia in 2017 while serving as a sport communications assistant and student-athlete mentor in the UGA Athletic Association.
A former collegiate All-American in soccer at Covenant College (’11), Dr. Pifer continues to study the game in his research and has consulted with professional clubs and personnel. He is proficient in the R programming language and implements the code in his courses and research. Multiple regression (predictive modeling) techniques and machine learning algorithms form the crux of his methodology.