About Me

I grew up in the Washington DC area in Northern Virginia, commonly referred to as NOVA. From an early age, I was hell-bent on leaving Virginia to move around, meet new and interesting people, and learn as much as I possibly can.

This is a picture of my late dog. He was my family's dachshund for 16 years. He was an incredible creature!

Anyone who has ever spent more than 30 seconds in NOVA knows that we have a severe traffic problem. I spent two summers in college interning in DC and commuting on I-95. During those long hours stuck in traffic, I often performed thought experiments on how NOVA could feasibly mitigate traffic.

During particularly frustrating commutes, my solutions converged to a form of judicial punishment for anyone who cut me off. But I also thought about what infrastructure changes could decrease traffic by x%.

My dream? No human would have to sit in southbound DC traffic ever again! I would be a hero. Billboards with my face would be erected all over Virginia. I would get the key to the city. Every city between DC and Richmond. But how would I do this?

Traffic led me to pursue a master's degree in Applied Operations Research (OR) at Cornell University. There I studied optimization, simulation, stochastic processes, and supply chain management. Anytime the word “bottleneck” was mentioned in the context of queue theory or supply chains, I had traumatic flashbacks of I-95.

Though I haven't solved the DC traffic problem yet, I have built and optimized many other network models. In 2017, I joined the Supply Chain Optimization team at an online furniture company based in Boston. I worked on distribution center footprint models and international volume routing solutions. I was fortunate to be surrounded by so many smart colleagues who taught me how to code OR models in Python and translate business questions into feasible optimization problems.

In 2019, I moved to Berlin, Germany to work in the EU headquarters. Within my company, I transitioned to a data science role when I was assigned a project that required a more sophisticated machine learning (ML) solution. Since then, I've been working on the EU Data Science team while teaching myself various machine learning concepts in my spare time. Luckily, most of my OR background transferred well to DS material. At the end of the day, we're all just trying to optimize aren't we? My DS career is only just beginning but already I am so excited about diving into all of the areas of ML.

Berlin is an amazing city. It is massive (3x the size of Paris) yet it feels small and welcoming. The culture here is vibrant and diverse complete with a large expat community. My German can absolutely use more practice but I can survive pretty well with “Morgen, ein kaffee bitte, danke, tschüüüüss.”