The Faculty

“The instructor taught things we could not learn elsewhere nor easily find in mainstream
non-academic books on the subject. I found their knowledge
and passion invaluable.”

-Class of 2021 Program Survey.

Master of Science in Analytics Faculty & Capstone Project Coaches

Dr. Je’Anna Abbott

Education

Ph.D. University of Houston
JD in International Finance & Economic Law
MS Analytics, Texas A&M University
MBA University of Chicago
MHM (Master in Hospitality Management) University of Houston
BA Austin College

Courses Taught

ANLY 620: Strategic Analytics

Research Interests

  • Hospitality Law and Ethics
  • Conflict Management
  • Negotiations
  • Human Resources/Legal
  • Reconciliation After Trust Violations
  • Social Responsibility
  • Data Science/Analytics

Ivan Arrington

Education:

MS, Analytics, Texas A&M University
BS, Business Administration, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Biography:

Ivan Arrington is passionately analytical.  Currently, he is an Associate Director of Global Insights at The Clorox Company in Durham, NC, guiding consumer research for their cosmetics products.  Ivan spent nine years at Butterball, LLC, leading market research and consumer innovation.  Prior to Butterball, Ivan worked for Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), a leading CPG research firm, for ten years.  At Butterball, Ivan invented the Butterball Blueprint, an insights-driven selling platform for holiday products and launched the Farm-to-Family by Butterball brand. At IRI, Ivan led a team of analysts overseeing the research needs for mid-sized CPG companies.

Dr. Jeremiah Green
Associate Professor of Accounting

Education

Ph.D. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
BS/MS of Accountancy, Brigham Young University

Courses Taught
BUAD 689: Financial Analytics

Research Interest

  • Empirical capital markets research focused on the use of accounting information
  • Hedge funds, equity & debts analysts, auditors, managers, the business press & trading strategies

 

Ph.D. Operations Research, Cornell University
MS Operations Research, Cornell University
BES/MS Johns Hopkins University

STAT 657: Advanced Programming using SAS

  • Optimization Modeling
  • Integer Programming
  • Combinatorial Optimization

Dr. ‘Jon (Sean) Jasperson
Assistant Dean of Learning Transformation & Academic Technology
Clinical Associate Professor

Education

Ph.D., Florida State University
Master of Accountancy, Brigham Young University
BS, Brigham Young University

Dr. Jasperson enjoys reading especially historical fiction, biographies, and juvenile fiction, logic puzzles, cooking breakfasts, and spending time with family.

ANLY 615 (formerly known as ISTM 615): Business Database Systems

Research Interests

  • Information technology adoption and use
  • Information systems implementation

Jamey Johnston

Education

MS Analytics, Texas A&M University
BS Geography, Louisiana State University

A 20+ year veteran of Data, Database Administration, Programming (Started with BASIC on a VIC 20) and GIS/Remote Sensing. Currently, a Data Scientist and BI Architect for a Fortune 500 company in the Oil and Gas industry. In his spare time he enjoys traveling with his wife on mission trips and visiting Disneyland and Walt Disney World. He is a professional photographer as well.

Dr. Edward R. Jones
Executive Professor

Education

MS. and Ph.D. in Statistics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
BS with Honors in Computer Science from Texas A&M University-Commerce

Dr. Jones worked in industry for a number of years before joining academia. He was a Baldrige Award Examiner, an elite group of leaders who help drive organizational performance excellence across the country. Dr. Jones enjoys sailing, motorcycles, and salsa dancing.

STAT 656: Applied Analytics Using SAS Enterprise Miner
ISTM 601: Fundamentals of Business Programming using Python, Alpha Vantage Stock Market API  and the Google Cloud
Capstone Project Coach

  • Applied Statistics
  • Statistical Computing
  • Data Mining/ Machine Learning
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Artificial Neural Network

Dr. Kendra Mhoon

Education

Ph.D. University of Texas
MS Texas A&M University
BS Grinnell College

Biography

Using Statistics she has had the opportunity to immerse herself in the transportation industry, the behavioral sciences, and nutrition. While doing research, she has continued to educate others. “My philosophy of teaching is based on a belief that learning needs to be student centered and that students need to be equal partners in the learning process.” Her role involves using her expertise to put the necessary resources in the hands of the students or more likely to be sure that her students are well equipped to find and evaluate the resources they need to answer their questions.

Courses Taught

ANLY 626 (Formerly known as STAT 626): Methods in Time Series Analysis

Research Interests

  • Utility of linear mixed models
  • Markov modeling in analyzing medical and behavioral intervention data with an emphasis on multiple time points

Pablo Ormachea

Education

JD Harvard Law School
MS Analytics, Texas A&M University
BA History and Government, University of Texas at Austin
Minor: Eastern European Studies

Pablo Ormachea is an analytics leader who specializes in designing and executing on data-driven strategy.  He strives to build effective, repeatable, and scalable processes that deliver meaningful results quickly.  He holds degrees from Harvard (JD), Texas A&M (MS in analytics), and UT (BA, double major and double minor) — winning several prizes along the way for his innovative quantitative work – and has served as a TAMU graduate student capstone coach since 2016.  Put simply, if you have data, he knows how to leverage it to maximize the return on assets across the company.

Pablo developed his data expertise while a postdoctoral scholar at Baylor College of Medicine’s department of neuroscience, where he designed big data projects and administered over $1m in awards for research at the intersection of crime, legal policy, and neuroscience. He honed it by leading data science consulting teams for Fortune 100 companies relying on his expertise in forecasting and applied machine learning.  Today, Pablo he applies it as head of analytics at Pendrick Capital partners, a health care financial services company with an extensive portfolio that spans the nation.

Pablo also excels at building and developing teams that can leverage complex data to deliver pragmatic solutions that affect the bottom line.  Under his direction, they have developed and implemented industry-leading risk, fraud, and cash flow predictive models using machine learning and deep learning techniques.  These models have profitably approved hundreds of millions in high risk, subprime financing.  His teams have also developed best-in-class self-service dashboards for all levels of leadership, from executives to operations and sales staff.

Ronald Pinto

Education

MS Analytics, Texas A&M University
BBA Business Administration, St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (India)

Biography

Ronald has a global senior leadership background in driving business operations, executing operational strategies and deploying critical systems into multinational industries and market spaces. High-capacity management experience in multi-project delivery, change management, risk mitigation, process design and financial analysis in growth-oriented business environments. He enjoys playing tennis.

Dr. Arun Sen
Professor

Education

Ph.D. Penn State University
MS Penn State University
M.Tech. Calcutta University
BS Bhagalpur University, India

Biography

Arun Sen is a Professor and was a Mays Research Fellow (2002-2006) in the Department of Information and Operations Management at Texas A&M University. Prior to joining Texas A&M, he was an Assistant and an Associate Professor in the Department of Management Science, University of South Carolina. He has published in several journals such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Communications of the ACM (CACM), Decision Sciences, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information Systems, Intl. Journal of Man-Machine Studies, EJOR, Computers and OR, Decision Support Systems, Journal of MIS, Omega, Journal of Bio-Medical Informatics (JBI) and others.

Courses Taught

BUAD 689: Data Warehousing

Research Interest

  • Decision support systems
  • Model formulation tools
  • Database management
  • Data warehouse
  • Web analytics
  • Web mining

Dr. Amalesh Sharma
Assistant Professor of Marketing

Education

Ph.D. Marketing, Georgia State University
MS Managerial Science, Georgia State University
MS Business Economics, Georgia State University
PGDM Marketing/Finance, ITM Business School, Navi Mumbai, India
BS Physics University of Delhi, India

Biography

Amalesh Sharma is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Mays Business School at Texas A&M University. He is interested in studying the impact of firm and customer level strategies on firms’ performance. His substantive areas of interest include New Product Management, Marketing-Mix Decisions, M&A, Customer Management, and International Business.

Courses Taught

BUAD 689: Predictive Analytics

Research Interest

  • Innovation
  • B2B (Buyer-Supplier relationship)
  • Retailing & distribution
  • Emerging markets
  • Marketing distribution

 

Dr. Hari Sridhar
Center for Executive Development Professor
and Associate Professor

Education

Ph.D., Marketing, Trulaske College of Business University of Missouri
MS Engineering Management, University of Missouri
BE Mechanical Engineering, R.V. College of Engineering, Bangalore, India

Hari is an expert in evaluating the effectiveness of firms’ marketing spending —a core responsibility of marketing managers. His research marketing mix analytics decisions and spans media, digital and business-to-business markets. Hari’s research has been published in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and Harvard Business Review, and featured in National Public Radio (NPR), Reuters Inc., FOX News, and Booz & Co. Hari recently published a book titled “Marketing Strategy: Based on First Principles and Data Analytics”. For his research contributions, Hari has received a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar award and the Varadarajan Award for Early Career Contributions to Marketing Strategy Research.

MKTG 625: Marketing Engineering

  • Media
  • Digital and business-to-business markets

Barbara L. Thompson, P.E.

Education

MS Data Analytics – Texas A&M University
BS Ocean Engineering – Texas A&M University

Biography

Ms. Thompson has 39 years of experience in the oil & gas industry including design, project management, business unit leader, business development and strategy. She began her fascination with data early in her career through the analysis of oceanographic data and its application to designing offshore structures.  She works at Baker Hughes in Oilfield Equipment and performs part time consulting in data analytics for various customers including a non-profit that she co-founded, Dive Pirates Foundation.   She was the Principal Investigator for ASME’s  “STB-1-2020:  Guideline on Big Data/Digital Transformation Workflows and Applications for the Oil and Gas Industry.”

 

Eric Ziegel

Education

MS Applied Statistics, Purdue University
BA Mathematics, Miami University

Eric Ziegel is an adjunct graduate professor in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University supporting the night MS(Analytics) program in Houston as coach for students’ Capstone projects. He also works part-time as a consulting data scientist and analyst and as an independent industrial short course instructor. Eric retired in 2014 after a 45-year career as an industrial statistician with Amoco and BP. He worked subsequently for 16 months as a contractor for Marathon Oil Company.
Eric has been a Fellow of the American Statistical Association since 1989. With ASA he has organized several technical programs, including the Association’s Annual Meeting, as well as serving as a section chair, committee chair, and member for several technical committees. His 25-year association with the journal Technometrics included 22 years as Book Reviews Editor and an honorary annual award in his name for best new book. More recently he has been active with the Data-Driven Analytics Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, organizing two technical programs, presenting papers at several technical meetings, and publishing in the SPE online library. Eric has 3 US Patents for solving petroleum engineering problems using data-driven models.
Eric was given the Distinguished Science Alumnus Award by Purdue University in 2016.