Graduate Alumni 2015–2019

After graduating, Micaela Bagley moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where she continues her studies of the high redshift universe.  She has recently been awarded time on the  James Web Space Telescope to study some of the most distant galaxies known.

Advisor: Claudia Scarlata

Read Micaela's Dissertation 

After graduating, I transitioned into a data science role at Seagate, then moved to the Bay Area to take up Machine Learning Research Engineering positions, first at Symantec, and currently at Cloudera where I focus on natural language processing.

Advisor: Claudia Scarlata

Following my graduate work in observational astronomy, I continued my research in infrared instrumentation as a postdoc with the SOFIA Science Center. I have since transitioned to an Instrument Scientist role with the SOFIA observatory, supporting the facility imager, spectrograph, and polarimeter. I am currently based at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Advisors: Terry Jones, Roberta Humphreys

After graduation, Evan Tyler became an Assistant Professor of Physics at the College of Saint Scholastica in Duluth Minnesota. In addition to teaching Physics courses, Evan conducts Space Physics research with undergraduates and remains engaged in public outreach both locally and through the Queer Science organization.

Advisor: Cynthia Cattell

Tony Young took a position as a Senior Data Scientist at Allianz Life here in the Twin Cities where he was brought on board to grow their analytics capability as their first Data Science hire.

Advisor: Liliya L. R. Williams

After graduating from MIFA in 2017, I took a position as a data scientist at eBay's product research team in San Jose, CA. Later on, I moved to a more rewarding role at Cogitativo, a healthcare startup in Berkeley. My main responsibilities as a senior data scientist involve training a variety of typical machine learning models. As an example, we build models for predicting the risk of hospitalization of Covid-19 patients based on their clinical history as well as demographic information. In addition, I've been involved in designing knowledge graphs and NLP pipelines for ingesting document and information retrieval.

Advisor: Lawrence Rudnick

Burcin Mutlu-Pakdil is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona. Her work has been recognized by several prestigious awards: 2018 Ted Fellow, featured in National Geographic as a “woman of impact”, 2019 AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador, and 2020 TED Senior Fellow. In Fall 2020, she will continue her work on near-field cosmology as a joint KICP and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Advisor: Marcus Seigar

Since graduating in 2016 I have worked in the Twin Cities as a Data Scientist, first at Veritas Technologies in Roseville and currently at CH Robinson Worldwide in Eden Prairie where our large team of data scientists, analysts and engineers create, test, and scale digital freight solutions.

Advisors: Roberta Humphreys, Robert Gehrz, Terry Jones