Brian is a Washington, DC-based data scientist originally from North Carolina. He likes politics, startups, and advanced baseball statistics.

   

Toolkit

  • Python, STATA, SQL, UNIX command line tools, AWS, Google Cloud
  • Natural language processing, machine learning, classification, regression, webscraping
  • Presentation and data visualization tools including Tableau, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Powerpoint

Experience

General Assembly

Washington, DC
General Assembly immersive program is a full-time 12-week course that develops statistical, programming, and data communication skills.
Data Science Immersive March - May 2017

  • Capstone project culminated in unsupervised natural language processing analysis of 750,000 complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A classification algorithm correctly identified which of 17 products a consumer’s unstructured text referred to 77% of the time.
  • Other projects included a clustering analysis of higher education spending, webscraping salary classification, random forest feature importance assessment of income tax returns on county-level voting patterns in the 2016 election.

Kaiser Associates

Washington, DC
Kaiser Associates is a boutique strategy consulting firm for Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare, technology, and consumer goods sectors.
Consultant, Business Strategy & Operations November 2014 – October 2016

  • Developed market assessments for products and services across industries through primary and secondary research, including: health economics analysis for $300 million medical device market, market entry for a new product category for a consumer goods company, and assessment of a firm’s value proposition for a private equity valuation and acquisition strategy.
  • Presented market data on industry standards for operational benchmarks to senior leadership in the healthcare, technology, and consumer goods spaces.

The Advisory Board Company

Washington, DC
The Education Advisory Board division provides strategic research and technology to university executives through qualitative research.
Analyst, Strategic Higher Education Research October 2013 – October 2014
Research Associate, Custom Higher Education Research January – October 2013

  • Produced original best practice research regarding student retention and graduation for at-risk students, conducting interviews with more than 150 university executives.
  • Provided real-time data analysis of organizational trends to more than 120 university partners.
  • Authored more than 30 original research reports as recommendations for institutional stakeholders on higher education issues from budget models to minority recruitment and retention.
  • Conducted market opportunity analyses to inform program choices for 20+ colleges and universities.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research

Washington, DC
Global strategic consultancy and political polling firm serving campaigns, non-profits and corporations.
Project Associate, Domestic Political Consulting Division January – December 2012
Research Associate, Operations Management Group September 2010 – December 2011

  • Analyzed polling data and drafted messaging strategies for top-tier political candidates, issue campaigns, and campaign committees, contributing language and analyzing data for more than 20 political races in 2012.
  • Managed project execution and methodology, negotiated budget expenditures of more than $1 million in qualitative and quantitative research at a net profit of at least $250,000 in 2011.
  • Developed innovative sampling methodology for mobile phones, web panels and traditional landlines, improving response rates by 25% among targeted demographics.

Education

General Assembly

Data Science Immersive March – May 2017

  • Full-time 12-week immersive course in the full life cycle of being a data scientist: from data ingestion, scraping, cleaning, mining to modeling (KNN, decision trees, ensembling, regression, forecasting, neural networks, clustering, Bayesian inference, etc) to deployment (AWS).
  • Statistical programming taught in Python; libraries included: Pandas, NumPy, Statsmodels, SciKit-Learn, BeautifulSoup, NLTK, Gensim, PyMC
  • Other programming tools included: PostgreSQL, mySQL

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

B.A. Economics, Political Science, Minor in Creative Writing May 2010

  • Certificate in Business Journalism, Minor in Creative Writing
  • Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg; Freiburg, Germany (August – December 2008)

Volunteer & Open Source Activity

  • Sanctuary Sheriffs: leading ongoing project to assess law enforcement responsiveness to ICE deportation requests for every local jurisdiction in the United States.
  • Daily Kos Presidential vote-by-LD project: contributor to an ongoing effort to map the US presidential vote to each legislative district in the country.