This is my first blog post, ever. I want to talk about some recent data science related projects and exercises that I’ve been doing on this blog.

Background

I am a PhD Chemical Engineer from the University of Minnesota, where my thesis work focused on efficient heat transfer in catalytic wall reactors. I did mostly experimental work, but also some modeling using reaction engineering (Chemkin) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD-ACE, Fluent) packages. I then worked for GE Plastics in process engineering roles for ~7 years, and I picked up Six Sigma and process simulation (Aspen Plus) skills. More importantly, I learnt to work with a variety of stakeholders in the organization, and picked up some very useful crisis management skills through some tough development challenges. I then moved to QD Vision for ~6 years, where I led process and product development efforts for a new display technology based on quantum dots. I got some great opportunities to execute process scale-up, and work with/sell to partners and customers in the Far East. We hit some great milestones during my time at QDV … we were the first to introduce commercial TVs with fantastic color gamut through Sony in 2013!

I’ve always been interested in math and chemistry, so chemical engineering was a natural area of study for me. But exposure to stats and Six Sigma during my GE days, and seeing tons of manufacturing data at GE and QDV go to ‘waste’ for lack of proper tools to mine insights from, led me to add data science skills to my toolkit. I started with self-learning through JHU and Andrew Ng’s offerings on Coursera, and then moved to a formal 12-week full-time Data Science Immersive program at General Assembly Boston.

I hope to leverage my domain knowledge and industry experiences to now apply these skills. Broad areas of interest include chemicals/materials, renewable energy, robotics, advanced manufacturing and biotech.

Writing style

I have lived in both the academic world and the ‘real’ world, and both have somewhat different writing styles that I’ve experienced (I have a couple of journal publications from my grad school days, and a number of internal company publications at GE). Blogging is distinct from either of these, and is definitely about bringing out the ‘you’ in your posts.

My style is going to start off as a mixture of the academic and industry worlds … which may sometimes be painful to read, but I promise to make it worth your while with clear (and succint) thought processes, lots of visualizations and solid conclusions.

Happy reading!