Joseph Gambino

About Joseph Gambino

I am a product designer and data scientist. I love coding and building things, but I love just as much taking those things into the field and testing them. I also love an office community; there’s no idea I’ve ever had that hasn’t been improved through collaboration. I’m constantly curious about finding ways to combine what I love to build with my passion for civic issues, particularly my love of public transit. My most recent foray into this space was an exploration of freedom of movement here in Chicago.

Experience

1. Senior Data Scientist

   IDEO

   Feb 2018 — Present · Chicago, IL

   I am so grateful to have begun my data science career at IDEO because of the foundational training it has provided. At IDEO I have learned never to fully trust the data. Always talk to people to get the full story. I’ve learned that all problems of prediction boil down to problems of trust, so the best solution is often for your design to communicate humility. Fundamentally, I’ve learned that people problems can only be solved by people solutions. While I’m always eager to code, I’m grateful to work with people who will back up the data scientist in the room when he says that an algorithm just isn’t the right solution here. Below are a few of my favorite projects: • Helped stand up a fake start-up as an ongoing research experiment. Translated hypotheses into an experiment design, then a “business model” and an operations plan. Wrote a custom staff and inventory management tool in React. Project managed external developers of the product app. Led and synthesized design research interviews to modify the experiments throughout. Managed a field office. Hand-delivered packages. Crafted the final story convincing the client to further invest in the industry, concept, and research capabilities. • Built a custom traffic simulation to model customers moving through a drive-thru and the resulting employee utilization. Incorporated customer data to study how different order-taking concepts affected throughput and slack in the system. Proved that proposed concepts relieved demand on employee’s time without slowing down service. • Wrote a custom ETL package (in SQLAlchemy) to extract data from internal ERP systems, consolidate into recognizable entities, and stand up a SQL database containing only what the user requests. Led the development of several new internals tools using the system.

Education

• Northwestern University

  Bachelor’s Degree, Mechanical Engineering, Certificate of Design, Co-op Certificate

  2009 — 2014

• Metis

  Data Science Bootcamp

  2017 — 2017