Sam Rizzo, Ph.D. Email & Phone Number

I’m a person who loves solving complex problems. To me, nothing beats the sense of accomplishment that comes from understanding the ins and outs of a problem and using them to determine the optimal solution. As a mathematician/data scientist by training, I enjoy both the theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning/AI. I enjoy communicating these topics to both technical and non-technical audiences.During my time as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, I worked with Peter Bubenik, Mike Catanzaro, and Vaibhav Diwadkar to apply topological data analysis to fMRI data -- this experience was/continues to be incredibly formative for me as it has expanded my perspective on data science and how it can be used to make inferences about data. This experience also reinforced the importance of cross functional communication as a part of a data scientist's toolkit. I graduated from Vanderbilt University where I received my master’s in December of '22 and received my Ph.D. in August '23. I really enjoyed my time at Vandy -- I found my time as both a TA and instructor of record to be incredibly fulfilling. My doctoral dissertation outlines a new perspective on using extremal metrics on compact manifolds to obtain ALE cscK surfaces. I have been conducted this research under the supervision of Ioana Suvaina. I am currently a Data Scientist at Willowview Consulting where I build data solutions to engineering problems. I enjoy participating in all stages of the data pipeline from data acquisition and labeling to deploying a final product.