Derek Topper Email & Phone Number

New York, NY, US

Nashville, Tennessee, United States

Lead data science and analytics strategy for a top baseball agency. Use data to help player clients and agents understand areas of growth and opportunities for improvement. Build models to aid in player future performance and value projection.

St Petersburg, Florida, United States

• Used Python, R, SQL and machine learning methods like XG Boost, to explore solutions to existing baseball problems through statistical modeling and data analysis and to present research findings to senior-level staff
• Championed baseball research projects through ideation, API ETL processes, data engineering, data preparation, model tuning and data visualization for a team that won a franchise-record 100 games and the American.
• Aided team through research projects, ad-hoc programs and automated reports, to help with a variety of aspects of Baseball Operations efforts, including on-field performance, salary analysis, amateur scouting, player.

Orlando, Florida

• Assisted in the development of various predictive processes, such as draft modeling, season simulation and player evaluation tools to distill complicated data science insights into a simple format to help our.
• Created, communicated and maintained automated reports and processes that employed analytical techniques to identify undervalued players, league-wide trends, referee tendencies, opponent strengths and weaknesses and.
• Developed ad-hoc programs and reports, to assist all aspects of Basketball Operations, including scouting, sports science and coaching analytics, using SAS, SQL, Python, and R.

Floral Park, New York

• Led efforts to optimize ticket strategy through the development of multiple ML-based attendance and revenue models.
• Helped to double our season-ticket member base through fan breakdown analyses, retention modeling and lead scoring.
• Generated the team’s ticket pricing structure, by establishing game tiers, ticket prices and revenue projections for future seasons, and worked closely with team leadership to turn such analyses into an actionable.

Berkeley, CA

• Oversee the development of over 100 club members to learn about the field of sports analytics and produce dozens of data-driven sports research papers and data-centric sports journalism articles.
• Arrange external events with professional sport teams such as our SAGB Case Competitions, where we have partnered with the San Francisco Giants’ and Sacramento Kings’ Analytics departments, and our SAGB Speaker Series.
• Command various special projects teams, in charge of independent research and analytics consulting for professional teams like the Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers, San Jose Earthquakes, Cal Bears Football.
• Oversee the education and production of 80 members of 11 research teams to create data-driven research across 4 sports
• Direct the development of 16 members of the data journalism committee to compose data-centric sports journalism articles.
• Command a small business development team, in charge of event planning, fundraising, outreach and publicity for SAGB.

Phoenix, Arizona Area

• Created an interactive dashboard examining Ticketmaster Resell data to allow various team executives to understand the single game operations of our secondary market, using SAS, SQL and TIBCO Spotfire
• Created various statistical models and metrics to dynamically predict individual game ticket sales and developed a variable pricing structure that set prices for each of next season’s games, so the team could decide.
• Discovered over 46,000 previously unidentified illegal “Broker” seat resales, which could save the team over $3.4 million

Berkeley, CA

• Planned syllabi and materials for two Data Science courses for the UC-Berkeley’s Data Science Education Program, working with professors and graduate students to direct and implement these data-focused efforts.
• Developed dozens of lab and homework assignments, using Jupyter notebooks, on topics ranging from classification and regression techniques to the ethical concerns of “big data," to be deployed in a cloud computing.
• Supervised two teams of students in researching topics, collecting data, modeling information and visualizing solutions.

Greater New York City Area

• Manage and examine the strategic planning of daily Citi Field food, beverage, merchandise, and promotional operations.
• Crafted exploratory methods to improve Venue Services campaigns and undertakings through various predictive analytics, data metrics, enterprise decision management techniques, investigative reports, and customer surveys.
• Compiled information from the team’s propriety business datasets to dissect market conditions and customer preferences to aid the team’s recognition of rapidly-changing consumer trends and explore creative solutions to.

Berkeley, CA

• Prepared and filed analytical reports for the Director of Player Personnel of the California Golden Bears football Team using the team's propriety data-sets.
• Developed and created visualizations depicting various information about the school, football program and football alumni to encourage recruits to sign on to play for the team.
• Consulted for the recruiting staff in a functional capacity to guide them in what statistics would help sign players, ranging from the average former-Cal player NFL average salary to the number of drafted Cal players.
• Explored and modeled how Pac-12 teams choose which players to target in their recruiting process, to identify which types of roles are sought by rival programs.

Berkeley, CA

As a teacher's assistant for Principles of Data Science, I hold weekly lab sessions throughout the semester to help students that may be struggling with material previously covered in class.I work with the course's professor and Graduate Student Instructors to pass on information about what topics the class - as a whole - may have more trouble with as well.

Berkeley, CA

• Direct the process improvement for the weekly circulation of 40,000 newspapers over 150 drop locations
• Collaborated with a team of six in operational advisory, decreasing rate of return by 50% over a 6-month period through various data metrics such as strategic A/B testing using Excel and Python
• Analyze readership data through the filing of six weekly reports and three monthly reports to develop and propose changes to distribution strategy for the newspaper to improve the return rates of Daily Californian boxes

Greater New York City Area

• Prepared and filed three monthly reports on the online traffic of over 15 million unique persons over more than 300 different owned or partnered websites, through GA and comScore data
• Curated the serving of hundreds of thousands of targeted advertisements through DFP and Ad Exchanges for major clients like McDonalds, AT&T, JetBlue and Allstate
• Researched and proposed the institution of a data management platform to better understand our audience and their unique qualities so our sales team can improve its marketing position

Greater New York City Area

• Researched and crafted 20 data-analytical college football previews for the publication’s forecasting almanac "Zone Blitz"
• Developed performance projections based on a model of teams' previous success, returning players and schedule for a return-focused audience.

Greater New York City Area

• Examined clients’ multimedia platforms through data analytics of platforms such as Google Analytics and Twitter
• Crafted press releases, articles and blog posts for clients in order to help maximize their audience and customer base
• Conducted and compiled data from customer surveys to help clients understand how their customers are finding and using their product as well as compose blog posts about market conditions and customer preferences

Long Beach, New York

• Broadcast a weekly segment entitled “The Voice of Science”
• Radio interview those doing research in the Long Beach community
• Research and discuss topics relating to the fields of science, technology and mathematics.

Long Beach, New York

• Assisted property managers in all phases of Superstorm Sandy relief effort
• Organized insurance contact information
• Visited sites for damage assessments
• Coordinated meetings with engineers, insurance adjustors, and clients

Master Of Information And Data Science, Data Science

Completed a Master’s degree in Information and Data Science through UC Berkeley.

Bachelor’S Degree, Data Science

Activities and Societies: • Founder and President of Sports Analytics Group at Berkeley • Sports Committee of Business Careers in.

High School

Activities and Societies: • President of High School Forensics Club • Editor-in-Chief of The Tide, High School’s Newspaper • Secretary of.

Certificate, Political Science And Government

Completed coursework in International Relations and Diplomacy

Certificate, Tropical Medicine And Ethnobiology

Completed coursework in Tropical Medicine and Ethnobiology at Jardín Botánico Wilson y Estación Biológica Las Cruces

Certificate, Mathematics

Completed coursework in Number Theory.

Certificate, Stem

Completed coursework in Probability and Game Theory, Cryptology, Genetics and Neuroscience.