John Foreman - Data Scientists at Work - page 102

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John Foreman
MailChimp
John Foreman is the Chief Data Scientist at Rocket Science Group, the company
behind MailChimp.com , Mandrill.com , TinyLetter.com , and twelve other email-
related web and mobile apps.The Rocket Science Group is an email delivery company
that focuses on transactional emails, marketing emails, and newsletters for groups
and companies ranging from one person all the way up to multinational companies.
The three main services send over ten billion emails per month for their seven million
customers. Ten thousand new members sign up each day. With this growth comes
challenges, as the increasing numbers of members, recipients, email addresses, and
emails sent make it harder and harder to fight spam intelligently, model email sender
and receiver behavior, and understand the overall email ecosystem.
Before becoming a data scientist, Foreman ' s career spanned positions at the National
Security Agency, at MIT in dynamic inventory management, at Booz Allen Hamilton
as an analytics and management consultant, and at Revenue Analytics, Inc., where
he helped Fortune 500 companies with revenue management, price optimization,
and sales forecasting. In these various roles, Foreman interacted with a wide range of
stakeholders—from the US Department of Defense and Internal Revenue Service
to companies such as Coca-Cola, Royal Caribbean International, and Intercontinental
Hotels Group. He holds an MS in Operations Research from MIT and a BS in
Mathematics from the University of Georgia.
Now a “ recovering consultant ” who has retained his client-centered perspective,
Foreman has embraced the world of data science. He is the author of Data Smart:
Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight, which demystifies the
field by explaining key data science techniques using powerful examples in simple
spreadsheets.