In a recent AMS Survey of New Doctorate Recipients, 33 percent accept positions in government, business and industry. What are these jobs like? How do you find them? And, are they interesting jobs? To provide insight into these questions, we will hold our annual Industrial Panel Discussion featuring four UW alums from the PhD program. The speakers on the panel are Clayton Barnes at Amazon Web Services, Rebecca Hoberg at Meta, and Tvrtko Tadic at Microsoft. All are invited to attend!
Biographical Sketch of the Panelists:
Rebecca (Becca) Hoberg graduated from UW in 2017 with a PhD in math, focused on discrete optimization and advised by Thomas Rothvoss. She was pretty undecided about what direction she would go after grad school, but ended up at Facebook/Meta and has spent the last 6 years there. The first five years were as a data scientist and about a year ago she switched to become a data engineer. Her current focus is on performance, reliability and efficiency for videos, and she's based in the Seattle area.
Tvrtko Tadić is a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft, working on integrating real-time data into AI, with a focus on advanced file search in M365 Copilot. He earned his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Washington, where he studied probability under the supervision of Krzysztof Burdzy. At Microsoft, Tvrtko has contributed to various projects, including Bing Maps, local search, the digital assistant Cortana, knowledge mining and graph learning within Office 365. Tvrtko is also a Visiting Scientist in the department, leveraging UW resources for research on probabilistic methods in data science and AI. This work, originating at Microsoft and partly developed there, was featured at this year's JMM in Seattle and ICLR in Singapore.
Clayton Barnes graduated in 2018 with his PhD in Mathematics from UW, studying probability under Krzysztof Burdzy, and also jointly earned his MS in Statistics from the Statistics Department. After graduating, he spent 1 year at the Université de Neuchâtel in Switzerland to work with Michel Benaim as part of a Swiss NSF grant, then 3 years at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology as a Zuckerman Postdoctoral Fellow, working with Leonid Mytnik and Haya Kaspi. In 2022 he moved to industry, working as a Research Scientist at Amazon Web Services as part of the EKS/Kubernetes service working on the open source software Karpenter. When he's not yelling at Claude or trying to remember CLI commands, he develops algorithms to approximate solutions for various flavors of the Bin-Packing Problem, and designs/analyzes experiments. He stays somewhat in touch with academia, actively refereeing articles and has some papers accepted recently-in the area of traveling wave solutions to SPDEs.
This talk will be hosted by Sara Billey and Linhang Huang.