Let's Optimize It: Experience

Southwest Airlines

Dallas, Texas

I currently work at Southwest as a Principal Consultant in the Network and Operations Planning group. Prior to this role, I managed the Operations Research team within the Network Planning department.

My team's mission is to build analytical apps, data sets, and strategies to help the company create the best schedule possible: across the flight, crew, and passenger networks. This is no small task; Southwest is one of the largest airlines in the world, carrying over 100 million customers per year to over 100 destinations by operating more than 4,000 flights each day.

My group and I work the whole project lifecycle: vetting and deciding which ideas to pursue, building the core operations research models as well as their user interfaces, and deploying/maintaining those tools as they're adopted by the department. Some of these models make heavy use of optimization techniques. Others merge and crunch large amounts of data. Still others systematize data analysis and custom business logic. The outcome? Tools that Southwest can rely on to manage schedule changes, calculate the durations of the flights in the schedule ("block" times), establish where and at what price points people book tickets, evaluate the interconnected impacts of schedules on costs, visualize flight/crew/passenger network performance, and more.

Wheels Up

Dallas, Texas

I worked at Wheels Up as a Strategic Analytics Manager. My role included taking point on data modeling and strategy, applying knowledge I've accrued over the years in the aviation industry. My key projects included building an optimization model to more efficiently schedule recurring pilot training, creating analytical presentations for investor relations, and building dashboards for scoring flight schedules and automating data quality checks.

Dimensional Fund Advisors

Austin, Texas

As an Associate in the Investment Analytics and Data group at Dimensional (>$600 billion AUM), my role was to deliver internal tooling to help portfolio managers work their funds. One of my projects was to build an application and associated database structures to create "target weights" for some of our funds, per specs from the company's quants. The market exposures of some products were straightforward to calculate while others required the use of relatively complex techniques like quadratic programming.

Another one of my projects was to calculate how daily fund investments or divestments should be settled for some of the funds. Alongside these core efforts, I also developed some data error checking automation and worked general data analytics support for the larger business.

United Airlines

Chicago, Illinois

I've had a few roles at United in both their Airport Operations and their Continuous Improvement and Enterprise Optimization groups. I wrote optimization programs to recommend staffing levels and shifting patterns based on the airline's flight schedule and service levels. Another project I had was to simulate the flight network and assess how irregular operations events (like weather) would impact on-time performance and customer experience. I earned my Six Sigma Green Belt by leading a project to harmonize Baggage Service Operations processes and staffing at hub airports.

Northwestern University

Chicago, Illinois

I studied Industrial Engineering at Northwestern, graduating Magna Cum Laude. I was a member of the engineering (Tau Beta Pi) and co-op (Kappa Theta Epsilon) honor societies. I wrote my honors thesis on a simulation and optimization program I built to model the impact of structuring passenger aircraft deplaning. I presented the work at INFORMS 2010, and later published in the Journal of Air Transport Management. The paper was picked up by CNN Travel, Insider, and Vox!