4:00–5:00 pm ERC 401
Astrophysics to Data Science Ali Vanderveld (Senior Staff Data Scientist at Wayfair) Ali Vanderveld received her PhD in Physics from Cornell University in 2007, focusing on theoretical cosmology. After two postdocs, first at Caltech and then at KICP, she fell in love with Chicago and wanted to try something new. As such in 2013 she made the transition to Data Science. In her second career she has used a lot of the same skills that she once used to study the Universe to study the worlds of e-commerce, education, civil infrastructure, politics, and nonprofits. She is currently at Wayfair, where her work involves building sophisticated machine learning models to enable recommendations of the right products at the right time. She will discuss the pros and cons of this career change, the day-to-day life of a data scientist in tech, and how one can prepare to make such a transition.
Event Type
Nov
18