Hi, I’m Paul

Well you have found my little website for… reasons? Hopefully good reasons and not just like identity theft or doxing reasons. The point of this site is so that I can link to things that I have written and so that anyone who becomes aware that I exist and wants to know “what is the deal with this Paul that I’ve just come across” can reasonably answer that question.

If you want a bio, I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, studied physics in undergrad at University of Illinois Champaign Urbana, then got a PhD in Plasma Physics at Columbia University in NYC under the very brilliant and motivated Thomas Sunn Pedersen. Maybe take a minute to rabbit hole on Thomas, he has a wikipedia entry! It is not in English and I only just learned about it now, but that is still very cool to me. There should be better content on what he is up to, the best I can find is this. Probably he needs a little website like this one that I’m creating for myself. Oh right, back to me.

After grad school I did what people did at the time when they realized they were studying the confinement of non-neutral plasmas on stellarator magnetic surfaces and that really only is relevant for confining antimatter and matter together and that none of that would be relevant to anyone for around 200 years: management consulting. I spent a few years at a boutique firm and then at a major bank and you can read about that on LinkedIn if that is what you are here for. Regardless, I moved on to data science with help from an Insight Data Science fellowship. I’ve been working in tech and have been just disgustingly happy ever since.

Since 2016 I’ve been building data products at PlaceIQ. PlaceIQ is a DaaS (Data as a Service) company that translates raw location data into useful datasets that companies can buy and analyze to learn neat things about aggregate consumer behaviors. Being head of Data Science at a DaaS company is living the good life. My team is brilliant, we work on high impact projects, and have great coworkers. I’d prefer if you didn’t kill me to take my job, but I also wouldn’t blame you.

In my free time I like doing things that let me spend basically every second with my wife. That means snowboarding, CrossFit (don’t worry we don’t need to talk about it), wandering through cities, food adventures, Korean tattoo artists, fostering dogs, and petting cats. I like a wide range of music as long as it is new, though the best gift you could give me is the recommendation of a great metal/hardcore band with no clean vocals. Though I won’t turn down a heads up of some good new K-Pop. I read a lot of technical articles and discussion on tech management through out the day, so at night I’m probably reading some sort of sci-fi or fantasy that I’m intensely embarrassed of. Finally, every night I go to bed excited about the next day because mornings mean coffee and I’m very much a fan of coffee. I have pretty specific and strong coffee opinions, but if you love coffee, even if it is 100% nothing like the coffee I like to drink, I love that and want to talk about it.

Finally, if you made it this far or even just skimmed, I have an offer for you: I really do enjoy talking about other people’s data/tech challenges and experiences. If you are looking to start a company, have recently started one, or work at an established company and want someone to bounce ideas off, let’s find time to talk. Maybe you don’t even think you have something data related to discuss, that could be true, but you might be surprised. The offer is out there, head back to the homepage and ping me on one of the social media sites there.