Insight Boston Alumni: Where are they now?
Insight Boston began its journey in 2015, with the first and only fellowship program dedicated to a career in Health Data Science. In 2017, we expanded the location to include our Data Science program, and in early 2018, we welcomed our first Data Engineering Fellows. Since Insight’s launch in Boston, we’ve built up a network of over 300 local alumni, at companies including Wayfair, CVS Health, BCG, Vertex, and many more.
We recently held a night of Lightning Chats, hosted in our Seaport District office, to catch up with our alumni and see what they’ve been up to since participating in Insight. We selected several Boston-area alums to give a five-minute presentation or whiteboarding session, followed by Q+A, to share some of the interesting projects they’re tackling at work.
We heard from:
Gareth Kafka, a Health Data Fellow from 2017, who discussed his work at Vectra AI where he uses reverse engineering strategies coupled with machine learning to model hackers’ behaviors and enhance data security for clients.
Jerry Chen was a Health Data Fellow in 2017 and joined Wayfair as a Senior Data Scientist on their Marketing team; he now manages the Data Science Measurement team. His presentation provided a high-level overview of various marketing channels at Wayfair, and he discussed the challenges of measuring marketing attribution — that is, how to know which marketing efforts were most effective in bringing in customers.
Yi Jin was a Data Science Fellow in 2018 and joined Tamr as a Sales Engineer. At the Lightning Chat event, she walked us through her approach to unifying high-dimensional clinical data by combining schema mapping and machine learning. These kinds of methods could help pharmaceutical companies shorten the time it takes to bring new treatments to patients.
Samta Shukla was a Data Science Fellow in 2018 and is now a Data Scientist at CVS Health. Her presentation highlighted some of her recent work, leveraging publicly available data to forecast the sales of cold, flu, and allergy medicines during the flu season.
Finally, Greg Antell was a Health Data Fellow in 2016 and is now a Data Scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He walked us through operationalizing machine learning to allow researchers to take advantage of clinical data, and vice versa.
Thank you to our alumni for sharing their projects, and to the event attendees for providing such thoughtful and engaging discussion. We’re excited to hold another night of Lightning Chats in Boston soon!
Interested in transitioning to a career in data? Find out more about the Insight’s Data Science, Data Engineering, Health Data, and Artificial Intelligence Fellows Programs in New York, Boston, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, apply today, or sign up for program updates.
