Mathematics in Industry Careers 2021
Speakers
Rachel Hart
Client Insights Consultant
American Century Investments
M.S. 2011, University of Washington
B.S. 2009, University of Kansas
Rachel Hart is a client insights consultant at American Century Investments where she develops predictive models, wrangles data, and designs visualizations. With a goal of enabling data-driven decision making, she works to increase sales by boosting efficiency and uncovering insights that facilitat targeted sales and marketing campaigns. Previously, Rachel was a statistician on the United States’ longest running longitudinal HIV study. In her spare time, she enjoys running, knitting, brewing beer, and spending time with her family.
American Century Investments has grown to become one of the country's top money managers serving financial intermediaries, institutional clients, and individual investors.
Bradley Isom
Credit Risk Analyst
T-Mobile
Ph.D. 2021, University of Kansas
Brad Isom is a Credit Risk Analyst at T-Mobile working in the Application Fraud Strategy Team. His team primarily works to minimize T-Mobile's fraud exposure in the Consumer and Business markets. His Ph.D. research focused on nonlinear, dispersive partial differential equations.
T-Mobile US provides wireless voice, messaging, and data services in the United States mainland including Alaska,Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The company operates the second largest wireless network in the U.S. market with over 95 million customers and annual revenues of $32 billion.
Kevin Li
Model Risk Program Manager
Federal Home Loan Bank
Ph.D. 2015, University of Kansas
Kevin Li (aka Xi Li) joined the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLBank) of Topeka in 2008 as a market risk analyst and is currently the Model Risk Program Manager at the Bank. In this role, he has responsibilities for all aspects of the Bank’s model risk management program, including policy maintenance, inventory management, model validation, model performance monitoring, documentation and risk reporting etc. Prior to taking the current position in 2019, Kevin has worked in various roles in the Bank’s market risk analysis area, as the key functions of interest rate modeling, market risk measuring and quantitative analysis. He also had experience working with the FHLBank Des Moines as a senior model risk analyst during 2014 through 2015, with the primary focus on validation of the Bank’s quantitative models.
FHLBank Topeka provides needed liquidity and funding to itsdiverse financial institution members throughout Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma.
Catherine (Katy) Micek
Data Scientist
3M
Ph.D. 2010, University of Minnesota
Catherine (Katy) Micek is a Data Scientist at 3M in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her Ph.D. is in Applied Mathematics. Katy has worked in both academic and industrial positions since earning her degree. In addition to teaching college mathematics, she has worked on cross-functional business teams as a data scientist, software developer, and predictive modeler across diverse industries (insurance, energy, finance, supply chain, and manufacturing).
More than 60,000 3M products are used in homes, businesses, schools, hospitals and other industries. One third of their sales come from products invented within the past five years, thanks to innovations from the thousands of researchers and scientists they employ around the world. With corporate operations in 70 countries and sales in 200, they are committed to creating the technology and products that advance every company, enhance every home and improve every life.
Luis Serrano
Quantum Application Scientist
Zapata Computing, Inc.
Ph.D. 2010, University of Michigan
Luis Serrano is a quantum AI research scientist at Zapata Computing, Inc. developing machine learning algorithms to work in quantum computers. Before that he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Quebec, then moved to industry, where he worked at Google as a machine learning engineer, at Udacity as the head of AI content, and at Apple as a lead AI educator. He is the author of the book Grokking Machine Learning and maintains a popular YouTube channel where he explains machine learning in layperson terms.
Zapata Computing, Inc. is a leading enterprise software company for quantum solutions. They are developing new approaches for computing values with a quantum computer. They have developed a method called robust amplitude estimation (RAE) to compute useful quantities with a near-term quantum computer more efficiently and accurately.
Andrew Steyer
Senior Member of Technical Staff
Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM
Ph.D. 2016, Mathematics, University of Kansas
Andrew Steyer received his PhD under the supervision of Professor Erik Van Vleck. His thesis work was on stiffness and stability theory of numerical ODE solvers and numerical methods for dynamical systems. Since graduating he has worked at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico as a postdoctoral appointee (Aug 2016-Sep 2017) and a senior member of the technical staff (Sep 2017-present). At Sandia he works primarily on projects related to the Department of Energy's "Energy Exascale Earth System Model" (E3SM), including the development of the HOMME-NH nonhydrostatic atmosphere dynamic core, derivation and implementation of implicit-explicit methods for time-integration in nonhydrostatic atmosphere models, and infrastructure work on the "Common Infrastructure for Modeling Earth" (CIME) CMake build/test system. His current research interests are in atmospheric modelling, implicit-explicit methods for time-integration, and numerical methods for PDEs.
Sandia National Laboratories is operated and managed by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC., a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc. National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia operates Sandia National Laboratories as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and supports numerous federal, state, and local government agencies, companies, and organizations.