Doing Data Science

Cathy O’Neil earned a Ph.D. in math from Harvard, was postdoc at the MIT math department, and a professor at Barnard College where she published a number of research papers in arithmetic algebraic geometry. She then chucked it and switched over to the private sector. She worked as a quant for the hedge fund D.E. Shaw in the middle of the credit crisis, and then for RiskMetrics, a risk software company that assesses risk for the holdings of hedge funds and banks. She is currently a data scientist on the New York start-up scene, writes a blog at mathbabe.org, and is involved with Occupy Wall Street.

Rachel Schutt is a Senior Research Scientist at Johnson Research Labs, and most recently was a Senior Statistician at Google Research in the New York office. She is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Columbia University where she taught Introduction to Data Science. She earned a PhD from Columbia University in statistics, and masters degrees in mathematics and operations research from the Courant Institute and Stanford University, respectively. Her statistical research interests include modeling and analyzing social networks, epidemiology, hierarchical modeling and Bayesian statistics. Her education-related research interests include curriculum design.

Rachel enjoys designing and creating complex, thought-provoking situations for other people. She won the Howard Levene Outstanding Teaching Award at Columbia and also taught probability and statistics at Cooper Union, and remedial math as a high school teacher in San Jose, CA. She was a mathematics curriculum expert for the Princeton Review, and won a game design award for best family game at the Come Out and Play Festival in New York.