Alumni from the UW Math Graduate Program and other universities have diverse career options in business, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations. 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 Michael Goff at Urban Cruise Ship, Stark Ryan at Waymo, and Simon Spicer at Reddit. All are invited to attend!
Biographical Sketch of the Panelists:
Michael Goff graduated from UW Math in 2010 with a focus on algebraic combinatorics, advised by Isabella Novik. After completing a postdoctorate at Vanderbilt University, Michael cofounded an environmental research consultancy Urban Cruise Ship. He has worked as an Energy Analyst at The Breakthrough Institute and as a fab technician at Jireh Semiconductor. Michael also conducts a Living Literature Review, Scaling in Human Societies, that is supported by a grant from Coefficient Giving. Michael's main research areas now are energy, environmentalism, and urbanism.
Stark Ryan graduated in 2022, studying algebraic combinatorics under Sara Billey. She spent one year as a quantitative researcher at IMC Trading in Chicago, before moving to the Bay Area to work in autonomous driving. Stark has worked on the Planner (path planning) teams at Ghost Autonomy and Waymo. She has been at Waymo for nearly two years, and recently transferred to the Pittsburgh office, where she will continue to work on ML model evaluation. She believes that model eval is the most exciting part of the AI/ML world!
Simon Spicer graduated from UW Math in 2015 with a PhD in Computational Algebraic Number Theory, focusing on rational point finding algorithms for elliptic curves. He jumped straight into industry after graduating, joining Meta as a Product Data Scientist and then Data Science Manager, where he found the skills he picked up during his studies around scaled data analysis a good fit for measurement problems in the social media trust & safety space. After 7 years at Meta, Simon did a 2-year stint at Google managing a small team of Research Data Scientists working on modeling problems for operating systems. And for the last 2 years he has been at Reddit, back as an Individual Contributor in the Trust and Safety Space, again tackling measurement, metric, data quality and transparency reporting problems. Apart from 1 year in the Bay Area, Simon has been based in Seattle (well, Shoreline) throughout, and still periodically visits the UW campus to reconnect with his alma mater.
Zoom option: https://washington.zoom.us/j/99536285511
This talk will be hosted by Sara Billey, and our GSR's Zawad Chowdhury and Patrick V O'Melveny.