Linda Collins did not follow a traditional path to academia. She worked for several years as a technical drafter in the architectural engineering industry. Eventually, she was able to return to college and earned a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 1991.

Collins continued her studies and earned a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Chicago in 1995. At Chicago, she discovered a love of teaching. She has since taught at Iowa State and UT San Antonio and held positions as an actuary working in reinsurance product development and corporate training. Collins earned the designation of Associate of the Society of Actuaries (ASA) in 2002. She returned to the University of Chicago in 2003 as a Senior Lecturer, teaching undergraduate courses and supervising the undergraduate teaching efforts of the Department's graduate students.

Recently, Collins' interests lie in the area of pedagogy in the undergraduate statistics classroom. She has attended conferences on classroom assessment and the new movement toward "reform" of the traditional mathematical statistics course. Recently, she has been developing classroom and teacher-training materials to encourage new teachers to engage in active learning practices in the Statistics classroom. To keep current in other areas, she is currently reading up on sequential Monte Carlo methods and their applications as well as variance autoregression techniques in Econometrics.