Please note this event has already taken place, see the news story here: Leading Companies Share Internship Paths for New Researchers in Virtual NISS Event
Overview
The NISS New Researchers Network is excited to host a special virtual event focusing on internship opportunities for those starting their careers in statistical sciences! Our panel of industry experts will share their own experiences from internships, discuss their current careers as statisticians or data scientists, and highlight some of the exciting internship opportunities available within their companies. Learn firsthand about the skills and qualifications these professionals developed through internships and how those experiences helped shape their career paths. Whether you are actively seeking an internship or just beginning to explore future opportunities, this event is designed for you!
Speakers
Claire Kelling, Assistant Professor of Statistics at Carleton College
Yaohua Zhang, Associate Director at Vertex Pharmaceuticals
Mei Li, Senior Product Manager at Meta
Johanna Plank, Vice President, Data Science Manager at Citizens Bank
John Lesniak, Senior Data Scientist at Citizens Bank
Yasomitra Sampat Kota, Data Scientist at Citizens Bank
Moderator
Jeremy Seeman, Research Associate in the Data Governance and Privacy group, Urban Institute & Adjunct Professor, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), University of Michigan
About the Speakers
Claire Kelling is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She received her Dual PhD in Statistics and Social Data Analytics from Penn State. Her research engages a mixture of statistics, data science, criminology, public health, and political science. Her primary focus recently is on the development of methods in spatial statistics for the analysis of policing data in partnership with community organizations. Claire participated in internships at the Social and Decision Analytics Lab, the RAND Corporation, and the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group during her time as a graduate student.
Dr. Yaohua Zhang is currently Associate Director at Vertex Pharmaceuticals. With more than 7 years in Vertex, Yaohua has increasing responsibilities from lead study statistician for pivotal Phase 3 studies, key member of submission team, to project lead statistician, leading biostatistics team supporting neurology pipeline development projects. His research interests include rare disease clinical trail designs, basket trials, adaptive designs, dose finding, real world evidence and recently the application of AI in clinical trials. Since 2023, he became an adjunct faculty in Boston University. Yaohua received his Ph.D. in Statistics from University of Connecticut.
Mei Li: Rooted in maths and actuarial science, Mei has an MS in Actuarial Science from the University of Iowa. Her first internship was as an actuary with Allianz Life, hired into a start-up risk hedging team as a derivative portfolio manager/software engineer in the same company. Learning programming on the job, she fell in love with building trading tool. In later of the 10 years life in risk hedging after joining AIG, she transitioned from trader to product manager. The experience in building products provided her the entry ticket to the tech industry. In 2021 she joined Meta, and now a PM on their family of apps business line. Along with developing her career in finance/tech, she also served as a professional photographer and owns her own business and team based in California.
Johanna Plank is a Data Science Manager at Citizens where she leads the Data & Analytics Enablement Center of Excellence, a function that supports data and analytics colleagues via educational, enablement, and community fostering resources and activities. Johanna also oversees the Center of Developing Excellence which owns data and analytics intern and early career development programs for practitioners new to the banking industry. In prior roles, Johanna contributed to several areas - omni-channel marketing test design and measurement for wealth, mortgage, and deposits; mortgage servicing and loss mitigation; consumer checking deposit fraud, and lead the Consumer Advanced Analytics Chapter, a team of analytical consultants that partnered with teams across the Consumer Bank. Prior to her Citizens tenure, Johanna worked as a Research Associate and laboratory manager at The Ohio State University where she led experiments in ruminant nutrition and mentored student researchers. Johanna holds a Master of Applied Statistics, a Master of Science in Ruminant Nutrition, and a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture.
John Lesniak is a Senior Data Scientist at Citizens working on Wealth Management Acceleration and Growth. As the team’s experimentation lead, he owns all experimental design and the subsequent statistical testing. Additionally, he uses a variety of AI/ML approaches for predictive modeling, cohort analysis, and other ad hoc analyses. Prior to his time at Citizens, John worked as a data science team lead at Deloitte, serving a variety of public and private sector clients. His contributions led to millions of dollars of cost savings and cost avoidance for American citizens. He has fulfilled multiple roles such as a junior data scientist, a client-facing data science team lead, and lead statistical researcher. John holds a MS in Statistics from The Ohio State University and a Bachelor’s in Marketing from The George Washington University. He has an upcoming publication in the Journal of Hypertension for his research in women’s health, using epigenetics to predict cases of preeclampsia.
Yasomitra Sampat Kota is a Data Scientist at Citizens where he is a member of the Consumer Deposit Analytics team. Healthy deposit accounts provide funding for revenue generating assets, help maintain bank liquidity and represent a suite of products that provide important financial services to customers. He is currently supporting various initiatives to deepen customer relationships. Sampat previously worked as a Data Science intern as a member of the 2023 summer cohort where he contributed to the development of mortgage contact center performance metrics and KPI dashboarding, and individually contributed to commercial modeling. Following the summer program, Sampat returned as an intern to support deposit fraud advanced analytics and the development of fraud prevention models. Prior to earning his Master of Science in Statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Sampat worked for Mu Sigma, Inc as a Decision Scientist, where he supported a Fortune-100 pharmaceutical company to showcase drug value. Sampat also holds a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering.
About the Moderator
Jeremy Seeman is a Research Associate in the Data Governance and Privacy group at the Urban Institute, an adjunct professor at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan, and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC). Jeremy’s research focuses on technical and policy solutions for responsible data sharing, with an emphasis on deploying and governing privacy-enhancing technologies to responsibly expand access to sensitive public good data sources. His work has been featured in numerous interdisciplinary venues including statistics, computer science, law, philosophy, and policy. Jeremy’s work develops privacy-ehnacing data sharing solutions for numerous public good organizations, including the National Science Foundation, U.S. Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Before joining Urban, Seeman was a Michigan Data Science Fellow at the University of Michigan. He received his BS in physics and MS in statistics from the University of Chicago and his PhD in statistics from Penn State University, where he was a U.S. Census Bureau Dissertation Fellow. His research interests interests include data privacy, privacy-enhancing technologies, social science reproducibility and data governance.
About the NISS New Researchers Network
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