Data Science Advisory Board

Alex Coman | Google Inc. 

As Director of Engineering for Google Ads, Alex is responsible for the infrastructure systems that power the open and free internet across the ad-supported web and apps ecosystems. Alex’s focus is on evolving the ad serving infrastructure with the help of his teams, towards supporting Google’s ad business evolution, delivering high performance at internet scale, and ultimately helping Google Ads to create value for users, publishers, advertisers and Google. Prior to joining Google Ads, Alex has contributed to other Google products such as Google Search, Google’s foray into social networks and Google Shopping. Alex holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Alberta with specialization in Data Management.        

Hans De Sterck | Professor, Department of Applied Mathematics

Hans De Sterck is a Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and is currently serving as the Chair of the department.

He did his Ph.D. research at the University of Leuven, Belgium, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA. After postdocs at the von Karman Institute and CU Boulder, he joined the University of Waterloo in 2004. Between 2015 and 2018, he worked at the School of Mathematical Sciences of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He served as the Director of Waterloo's Centre for Computational Mathematics from 2020 to 2023. Prof. De Sterck's area of research is numerical methods for computational science and data science. In particular, he has worked on numerical methods for PDEs and numerical linear algebra, including multigrid methods. More recently he has worked on convergence acceleration methods for optimization, with applications to tensor decomposition and problems in machine learning. He is a SIAM Fellow. He was an invited speaker at the 2019 ICIAM conference, and is a recipient of the 2015 ICPADS Best Paper Award, the 2012 Ontario Early Researcher Award, and the 1999 UCAR Outstanding Publication Award.

Prof. De Sterck is the Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing. He is a member of the SIAM Council and a Council representative to the SIAM Board. He co-chaired the 2015 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering and served as the chair of SIAM's Activity Group on Computational Science and Engineering in 2017-2018, and as the inaugural Chair of SIAM's Activity Group on Data Science in 2021. 

 Jeff Hatcher| Canadian Institute for Health Information

As director of Advanced Analytics at the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), Jeff Hatcher’s responsibilities and interests include use of statistical and machine learning methods in the development of models for managing the health system and for protecting the privacy of personal health information. Jeff is also currently leading a multi-year initiative to modernize the software stack used by CIHI staff in their analytic work and to evolve the data science methods and practices at CIHI. 

Prior to joining CIHI in 2002, he worked at several other public and private organizations, most notably Statistics Canada and Bell Canada. Jeff is a statistician and economist by training. 

Bethany L. | Canadian Centre for Cyber Security

From a background of Math, Theoretical Linguistics, and Computational Linguistics, Bethany worked in academia then applied Data Science within the Government of Canada. She draws on a deep understanding of language data combined with technical skills to create automated processes and Machine Learning enabled applications to support frontline analysts and wrangle real world data for productive use.    

Miguel Lacerda | Balyasny Asset Management 

Miguel Lacerda is a Senior Data Scientist and Head of the Data Science and AI Academy at Balyasny Asset Management. Prior to this, he was the Chief Data Scientist at a boutique asset management firm and the Group Head of Advanced Analytics at a large financial services company in South Africa. Before moving into the private sector, he was a Lecturer and Researcher at the University of Cape Town, where he led the development of the first undergraduate and masters programs in Data Science in the country. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Galway in Ireland.          

Yuying Li  | Graduate Program Co-Director, Data Science

Professor Yuying Li received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1988. She is the recipient of the first prize of 1993 Leslie Fox Prize in numerical analysis, Oxford, England. From 1995-2005, she was a senior research associate in the computer science department at Cornell University. Since 2005, Dr. Li is a Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Her main research interests include computational finance, computational optimization, and machine learning. She is currently a Co-Director of the Data Science Program (MDSAI and MMath in DS) at Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo.                         

Jimmy Lin | Professor, Cheriton School of Computer Science 

Jimmy Lin is a professor at the David R. Cheriton Chair in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. Previously, Jimmy was at the University of Maryland. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT in 2004.   

His research aims to build tools that help users make sense of large amounts of data. Jimmy’s work is an intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and databases, with a focus on large-scale distributed algorithms and infrastructure for data analytics. 

 Presently, he serves as the Chief Technology Officer of Primal, a Waterloo-based synthetic semantic data company focused on creating meaning computers can understand. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist of RSVP, a Waterloo-based startup that builds deep natural language understanding technologies to facilitate seamless dialogues between users and systems.   

Paul McNicholas | Professor, Department of Mathematics & Statistics | McMaster University

Paul McNicholas is a Professor and Dorothy Killiam Fellow in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He is the (Tier 1) Canada Research Chair in Computational Statistics and a member of The College of the Royal Society of Canada. Paul’s research focuses on computational statistics, particularly mixture model-based clustering and classification. His current research interests include non-Gaussian mixtures, matrix-variate distributions, and real problems in big data analytics.    

Eric Morrow | BMO Financial Group

Eric is currently the Managing Director of the Enterprise Data Science & AI group within BMO's Data and Analytics (DnA) organization. As a horizontal function within BMO, his team of data scientists and AI developers engages with groups and services across the organization to develop anything from data-driven insights to production ML/AI-based solutions on topics ranging from price optimization to cybersecurity-threat detection and beyond.  
 
Prior to BMO, Eric worked in the aerospace industry on spacecraft development and robotic operations on the International Space Station. He has also worked in the exploration geophysics field on innovative gravity measurement systems.  
 
Eric holds a PhD in geophysics from Harvard University and Masters degrees in physics and aerospace engineering from the University of Toronto.    

Tamer Özsu | Graduate Program Co-Director, Data Science

M. Tamer Özsu is a University Professor at Cheriton School of Computer Science at University of Waterloo and Co-Director of the Faculty of Math Data Science program. He has served as the Director of the Cheriton School and Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Mathematics. His research is on distributed data management and the management of non-conventional data. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),  the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), and Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA); he is also Life Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is an elected member of   the Science Academy of Türkiye, and a member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society.

Anindya Sen | Professor, Department of Economics

Anindya Sen is a professor at the Department of Economics where he has taught since 1999 and is the current Acting Executive Director for the University of Waterloo Cybersecurity & Privacy Institute, and the Director for Graduate Diploma in Computational Data Analytics for the Social Sciences & Humanities (CDASH). In 2014 he was recognized for his innovations in teaching and mentoring of students with the University Award for Distinguished Teaching. 

He has published research on the relationship between higher cigarette taxes and smoking, the impacts of market power on prices charged to consumers and firm level productivity and innovation, and the effects of higher minimum wages on employment and poverty. His current work has focused on: using advanced Machine Learning models in the analysis of government interventions on the spread of COVID-19 and identifying best Emergency Room protocols to reduce readmissions from cardiac arrests; the economics of data markets and privacy; studying human-computer interaction in the context of cybercrimes; and understanding societal trends in trust, and misinformation.