Allen Minch Email & Phone Number

Two of my biggest passions are math and commercial aviation. I would love to have a career using my mathematical skills to support data-driven operational decision making in a commercial aviation context.I see tremendous beauty in pure math, but I find math most invigorating when applied to real world problems. My courses in statistics (including two as part of my third major in Economics), numerical methods, optimization, and mathematical modeling (differential equation and/or probabilistic models especially), and machine learning have given me a taste of the great explanatory and predictive power that math has for analyzing and optimizing real-world systems based on real-world data. I am excited that by majoring in both Math and CS, I can develop an understanding of the math underlying tools like optimization, mathematical modeling, and machine learning, as well as the programming skills to bring these mathematical tools to life computationally.. I would love to be able to apply my passion for applied math to questions and problems that arise in the context of commercial aviation operations. Ever since I was a young child, my favorite part of any family vacation has been waiting in airports and being on airplanes; as I have grown older, I have increasingly found the volume and variety of data that airline operations generate very captivating. I enjoy studying real-time flight info on FlightAware, and I have undertaken some small projects of personal interest utilizing airline and airport data to look for patterns and relationships. My summer internship in the Division of Forecast & Performance Analysis in the Office of Aviation Policy and Plans at the Federal Aviation Administration was an incredible opportunity to begin to formally bring together my math and aviation interests and knowledge.I am looking forward to pursuing a PhD in operations research / industrial engineering to prepare myself for a career using interesting mathematics to address challenges in the realm of logistics and/or transportation. At this point, my passion lies in commercial aviation, but I have yet to see what other interesting application areas may cross my path while pursuing a PhD.