2016 Alumni Notes Graduation Years 2011-12

2012

Neal Grantham

I am in my fifth and (hopefully) final year of the statistics doctoral program at North Carolina State University. My dissertation work is on the development of hierarchical Bayesian models for the analysis of sparse, high-dimensional microbiome data. If all goes well, I will graduate in Summer 2017 and transition from academia to the tech industry where I hope to work as a data scientist or quantitative analyst. While I've enjoyed calling Raleigh home the past four years, I will likely be looking for a job that is based on the West Coast.

Samantha Law

I am currently in my third year working for MINDBODY, a SaaS company located right here in SLO, which since the last Stat Department update is now a publically traded company on the NASDAQ. Working for a company leading up to an IPO and through the first year post-IPO has been a very busy and wild ride, yet an extremely rewarding learning experience. Also exciting is the creation of our newly formed Data Science Department that centralized all analysts and business intelligence across the company. With the creation of this new department, I have been promoted to business data analytics manager (prior to that I was the marketing analytics manager and sr. marketing analyst).

In my new role, my responsibilities have expanded past marketing to managing the data analytics programs for three departments — marketing, sales and payments (merchant account processing) — overseeing the entire funnel from prospect to customer. I lead an amazing team of five other analysts who provide analytical support to those departments by leveraging our vast and unique data to inform and influence business decisions across the organization. Every day provides a new challenge and new problem to solve, and I absolutely love it. It's been four years since I graduated from Cal Poly, and I still wake up every morning grateful that I was able to stay on the beautiful Central Coast doing what I love with a fulfilling career. It has been a great year, but most exciting of all is that I'm recently engaged and will be getting married in September of next year.

Chelsea Lofland

I am (supposedly) finishing the final year of my Ph.D. work on Bayesian methods for hypothesis testing in political science. Has it gone by that fast? Just kidding. This past September I also teamed up with Rebecca Ottesen to chair the Western Users of SAS Software conference in San Francisco, which was the best WUSS ever! Outside of research and conferences I spend my time cooking and eating way, way too much.

Logan Lossing

I’m in my second year of lecturing for the Statistics Department, teaching business statistics while managing my family’s businesses with my wife Dana and working on new projects of our own. In my personal life, my wife and I celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary in September. We enjoy living in our tiny one-bedroom house near the vineyards in Edna Valley with our Catahoula hound dogs Rawlee and Edna. I will also be performing for my third year in the Civic Ballet's performance of The Nutcracker at the Performing Arts Center in December. Academically, I have been investing a lot of my time learning about deep learning and software engineering.

Julia Maddalena

Since leaving Cal Poly nearly four years ago, I have grown drastically both professionally and personally. I received a master’s degree from UCSB in June 2015, after spending two years focusing on advanced statistical theory and applications, during which I was very grateful for my education at Cal Poly. During my time in Santa Barbara I also worked as a teaching assistant, which allowed me to discover my passion for teaching.

However, I was eager to move back home to Denver and work in industry, so I didn’t do a Ph.D. and followed my heart. Since August 2015, I have worked out of an office in Boulder, Colo., as a statistician for Boston Heart Diagnostics, a laboratory focused on testing cardiovascular markers and providing patients with a program to encourage positive lifestyle changes. As you can imagine, we collect a great deal of data and only a small team of three of us work with it daily to uncover some truly amazing clinical trends, making us incredibly valued by the company. In fact, my team and I alone have recently won company-wide awards for our contributions. While I don’t always use statistics, I do always use R, and I am so grateful to have found a position where this is the case. My team traveled to Stanford for the UseR conference in June, and we are currently looking into buying RStudio Server Pro and Shiny Server Pro to expand the use of R within the company (and for only $10,000 each!). For those of you still at Cal Poly, I hope you are thoroughly grateful for the wonderful professors and staff who are helping you to start your career and for the beautiful city you live in that I hold so dear to my heart.  

Diana Shealy

Since graduating, I've been working as a data scientist in Silicon Valley. I stayed at my first company, Workday, for three years before moving to a start-up called Treasure Data. I just passed my first year anniversary, which just shows you how fast time flies. At both companies, I helped them utilize their growing amount of customer data for valuable insights. I mainly work with product managers to help them refine their road maps and with engineers to better aid them in making good engineering decisions. 

Outside of work, I spend my time on home improvement projects for the house I bought three years ago. I've become a huge music nerd and now run an online music blog and write for a few other music publications. I'm constantly going to concerts and occasionally shoot concert photography. My little music hobby has taken me to both Japan and Europe for festivals, which in turn made me fall in love with Japan. I now travel to Tokyo two to three times a year and am slowly learning Japanese. 

I have been thinking about maybe going off to grad school one day. Maybe.

2011

Juliana Fajardo

I am proud to say I completed my master’s program and received my MPA with a dual concentration in nonprofit management and environmental policy, management, and law at the University of Colorado, Denver in December. I am now working as the development coordinator for Museo de las Americas, a museum located in the heart of Denver’s Santa Fe Art District that focuses on Latin American arts, culture and education. It has been a challenging yet rewarding experience so far and I love the Museo familia! I also currently serve on the board of directors of the Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (YNPN) Denver, who advocate for and provide programs that help develop current and emerging nonprofit leaders and help young nonprofit professionals connect with their peers.

In addition to the research I conducted for my capstone project, I have worked with Earth Force, a nonprofit that empowers kids to be active citizens through learning how to improve the environment and their communities, to support the program evaluation of their Keep It Clean-Neighborhood Environmental Trios (KIC-NET) program. 

For the past few years, I’ve enjoyed exploring everything that Colorado has to offer and connecting with fellow Cal Poly alumni also living in Denver.

Alex Herrington

In my last update I mentioned that after graduating from the North Carolina State Advanced Analytics Master’s Program, I went to work at Lowe's Companies, Inc. Within the last few months, I left my job at Lowe's and joined Direct ChassisLink Inc. My new company is a leader in marine cargo transportation based in Charlotte, NC. In addition to a new job I'm got married on 11/11/2016. My fiancé, Lindsay, and I met in grad school at North Carolina State, so we have similar backgrounds and can nerd out at the dinner table. It has been an exciting 2016, and I look forward to what 2017 brings.

Tiffany Russell

I am working as an application developer in Agoura Hills and enjoy building and enhancing web applications and supporting data migration activities. In my spare time, I enjoy hiking locally in Ventura County as well as near Malibu, playing tennis and traveling (most recently visiting Zion, Arches and Canyonlands national parks).