Russ Ronalds Email & Phone Number

I have a career background in project management, operations and staff training in the leadership education and manufacturing industries, and I studied linguistics in a highly-ranked program.In linguistics, my favorite projects require intentional structuring and examination of data in order to achieve a directed purpose or to scrutinize contextual features. I have been involved in a wide range of creation of such data through running experiments, recording speech participants, and creating linguistic surveys. The analysis of human language data created for these projects necessitated learning Python to implement algorithms for processing and representing the results, and re-encouraged my long-held love of spreadsheets. As well, these projects gave me experience with a variety of statistical language models from the omni-present probabilistic n-gram to transformers and BERT. In a more abstract way, these projects reinforced ideas of Bayesian reasoning that are crucial to avoiding common errors in thinking about real-life phenomena.For more than a decade I worked for a non-profit that focuses on leadership education programs. During my time there, I engaged with every facet of this organization, from hiring, training and leading small to mid-sized groups, to the development and management of a new site. I worked cross-programmatically on teams that developed curriculum and guidelines that are still in place today and that continue to drive and direct the organization and its team-members. Most importantly, I have worked to foster inter- and intra-organizational relationships, and have been tasked with juggling the needs of leadership, team-members, clients and business partners.In the manufacturing field, my roles were focused on the success of products rather than educational experiences. I was steeped in the business’ existing production process, which required continual efficiency and time sensitivity. At the same time, I worked closely with the owner in analyzing and improving our business and project practices to best align them with our goals and limitations. Our update process was an iterative re-examination of production methods within their respective constraints. Throughout my time there, I was part of long-lasting changes to the production model, the modification of which allowed us to be more flexible and efficient with our employees and materials.

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  University Of Massachusetts Amherst

  Linguistics