Scott Murdoch

Senior Director, Data Science @American Cancer Society

In my current role, I built ACS\'s data science practice from the ground up, overseeing team expansion, data migration to Snowflake, senior leadership visualizations, and the creation of 2-year strategic roadmaps. I grew the team from 0 to 11 direct reports and increased the budget from 0 to $1.6M in just two years. I successfully gained approval from the C-Suite and Board for critical data initiatives, including data governance and Snowflake data warehouse projects. I formed a comprehensive team, bringing together data engineers, Snowflake managers, analytics engineers, BI specialists, and data scientists to offer end-to-end data support across the organization. Highlights of accomplishments in this role include: • Directed an Extramural Discovery Science Project involving $100M in grants for clinical research. Modernized grant tracking system, migrating from a dated database to Snowflake, resulting in daily automated updates and 5 dashboards addressing 90% of the team\'s reporting needs. Collaborated extensively with business users over 6 months, ensuring dashboards met requirements effectively. • Recruited a data scientist to develop a machine learning (ML) model to classify breast cancer tumors via whole slide images into stage and grade with high accuracy. If successful, the ML model will be open-sourced via API to speed up classification supporting cancer research. • Currently fine-tuning an in-house LLM (ChatGPT) based on PubMed, 5.5M full text articles, to identify new research areas to fund via grants.