Schooling & Early Career:
Bryan graduated with honors in Cognitive Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis where he also studied American Culture Studies and Political Science. He spent the majority of his high school and undergraduate summers in a Neuropathology research lab studying Alzheimer’s disease. After graduating, he started his career as a high school math teacher in Durham Public Schools, North Carolina, through Teach for America. Bryan moved into analytics through an Education Pioneers fellowship as a School Performance Analyst in Colorado. He then returned to North Carolina where he completed an MS at The Institute for Advanced Analytics at NC State University.
Career in Data Science:
Bryan has worked in data science at NetApp since July of 2017. He has worked as lead data scientist on a wide range of problems with different teams in customer support, sales, and pricing. Examples of his projects:
- Support ticket prioritization: Rate open customer support tickets according to risk of escalation.
- Forecasting: Produce automated sales forecasts across product lines and geographies.
- Price optimization: Establish statistical bases for price and discount guidance on product configurations.
Outside of his direct responsibilities, Bryan is active in fostering internal and local Data Science communities. Examples of his engagements:
- Co-lead NetApp Data Science study group on topics including Feature Engineering, Pricing Optimization, and Interpretable Machine Learning.
- Promote adoption of improved practices in areas such as hiring Data Scientists and workflows for predictive modeling.
- Present to local and global Data Science communities.
- Mentor new hires, support local university students completing capstone project, teach Data Analytics workshops.
- “NetApp Service Award” recipient in recognition of volunteerism.
Bryan created this blog as a place to document some of his ideas and learning. He wanted to do so in a way that was consistent with the open tutorials, books, software, and communities he has learned from over the course of his career.