Zach Turner Email & Phone Number

Northbrook, Il, Us

Northbrook, Il, Us

Champaign, Il, Us

The Introduction to Data Science course is designed to provide students with practical foundations in data management, analysis, and visualization. The course is primarily focused on R, but includes other topics such as regular expressions and SQL. My primary duties include leading tutorial sessions, hosting office hours, and assisting in course webpage moderation.

Northbrook, Il, Us

The Marketing Analytics team at Allstate is a branch of the broader marketing department that aims to provide business insights through predictive modeling and experimental design, Some of my responsibilities include:• Developed a proof of concept framework for integrating Hadoop R Streaming in our modeling in order to reduce data transfer time.• Built predictive model (GBM) using demographic information to rank individuals on propensity to obtain quotes and purchase products. • Analyze sales lead system to determine characteristics of successful marketing leads in order to provide higher quality leads to our agents.• Devised strategy to re-allocate advertising budget mid-campaign to increase returns. Also examined competing geographic targeting strategies to influence future campaigns.

Bloomington, Illinois, Us

As a predictive analytics intern, I conducted semester-long research projects in various business areas, such as claims. Some project highlights:• Created predictive model (logistic regression) to identify suspicious claims. Later benchmarked this model against several machine learning classifiers (SVM, Random Forest).• Compared functionality and performance of open source (R) and proprietary (Salford Systems) tree algorithms to aid in licensing decisions.

Bloomington, Illinois, Us

In the strategic resources department, I worked on a number of projects to support the claims and legal department:• Reviewed claim files to uncover information not captured in the standard claim descriptions.• Electronically harvested internal documents and created web reports to aid the business legal and intellectual property teams.

Champaign, Il, Us

I taught an honors freshman seminar class, Leadership & Society (LAS 122) that focused on pushing students to think at larger scales than the college community. I led class discussions on humanitarian issues that had impacts on global, national, and local scales (topics such as education, poverty, hunger, etc.). Each semester I taught a new group of roughly 20 students, mostly domestic, some international, but all from unique backgrounds.During this time, I also worked closely with the honors director to revamp the program to shift recognition from a solely academic basis to better promote community engagement and leadership within our students.

Champaign, Il, Us

In the biomathematics program, two biology students and I formed an undergraduate research group that received an NSF grant to conduct an original research project in biology. We created our own experiment to analyze the feeding behavior of the largemouth bass. In addition to analyzing the experimental data, I also operated daily experiments with live bass and prey. Our group presented our findings at a poster session at the Animal Behavior Society conference in Boulder, Colorado.

Master’S Degree, Statistics

Bachelor’S Degree, Statistics