About

By day I am an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and by night I'm a second-year Ph.D. student in the economics program at George Mason University.

At the BLS, I work on the data pipeline that determines where to collect the prices used to calculate the Consumer Price Index (CPI). I have worked on projects analyzing survey metrics (response rates, non-response analysis), to develop programs for record linkage and entity resolution, and programs to improve data quality from web sources, including APIs and web scraping. In fact, many of the code tutorials are derived from projects at the BLS.

I have been regularly invited to lecture at Georgetown University's School of Continuing Studies in the data science certificate program. I lecture on applying visual techniques to several stages in the data science pipeline, from exploratory data analysis and feature analysis to model selection, steering, and evaluation.

As for academics, my research is prmarily focused on the economic processes that transform waste into useful goods. The economics of waste has provided a fascinating medium through which to study microeconomics, economic history, market process theory, and entrepreneurship. I expect this to continue, but it isn't clear if this focus will be sufficient for a dissertation.