SAS Day 2019

SAS Day 2019 - Biographies

Mehron Beheshti

Mehron Beheshti is a Senior Statistician at State Farm, where his role focuses on the design and analysis of business experiments. Throughout the past five years, he has helped business partners turn their ideas into experiments, allowing them to accurately and confidently quantify the impact of their strategic decisions. Mehron also has experience a predictive modeler and assists with the supervision of the Modeling and Analytics Graduate Network (MAGNet) internship program. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Economics and a Master’s degree in Statistics, both from the University of Illinois.

Zhuo Feng is a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in statistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has taken several computational and data-intensive courses. He is a member of Alpha Phi Omega, an organization dedicated to service and leadership. Also, he serves as vice president of Game Night, an RSO dedicated to giving students screen-free social activities and a playful, collegiate atmosphere. Upon graduation, he plans to pursue a master's degree in statistics in preparation for a bright career in data science.

Angela Fullenkamp is an Analytical Training Consultant within the SAS Global Academic Program. Angela received both her B.S. and M.S. in Mathematical Sciences with an emphasis in Statistics from Clemson University. Before joining SAS, Angela taught mathematics and statistics courses in academia at both the college and high school level. As part of the Global Academic Program at SAS, Angela provides consulting around the country to universities, community colleges, and high schools by teaching educators and students how to use SAS software and how to integrate it into their courses and projects.

Gayoung Kim is a senior with a shining future as an educator. Her major is mathematics, with a minor in secondary education, with a focus in English as a second language and statistics. She is also studying secondary education as a minor to be a high school math teacher. She has taken on several teaching and tutoring positions in the Mathematics Department and the Office of Minority Student Affairs. All of these academic goals will surely propel her to be the best educator that she can be.

Christopher Kinson is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Statistics Department and serves as an Academic Advisor for the Statistics Master's Programs. He earned the PhD from the Statistics Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017. As a Teaching Assistant Professor, he works on statistical methodological research as well as research centering statistics and data science education. He is focused on longitudinal dimension reduction techniques, text mining, Git and markdown documentation, and improving student confidence and sense of belonging in statistics - especially underrepresented students. He strives to always and forever best represent his family and his hometown of Albany, Georgia.

Kagen Quiballo is a senior at Illinois double majoring in Mathematics and Statistics with a minor in Informatics. He is involved with various academic groups on campus such as Math Ambassadors and Stats Ambassadors. Kagen gained a rigorous experience as a research assistant in the Illinois Geometry Lab. He recently won the Association of Research Libraries Fellowship for Digital and Inclusive Excellence. He hopes to continue his education pursuing an advanced degree in data science and analytics.

Kyuseok Roh is a student majoring in statistics and minoring in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With multiple internship experiences as a data analyst, he has learned basic applications of natural language processing and sentiment analysis in marketing. He has lead a student-based statistical consulting team for a year. On that team, they provided in-depth market penetration strategies based on statistical analysis. K. Roh is a co-founder of Codable, an RSO for students interested in web development and deep learning. He is always willing to work with others, especially for objectives in statistics and data science.

Sundaresh has 14 years' experience in the analytics domain, in areas such as customer intelligence, fraud and risk management. He is actively involved in solution design, functional and technical enablement, and customer advisory in order to help organizations make better decisions. An experienced SAS practitioner, Sundaresh has also worked with other modern platforms for artificial intelligence. Having recently acquired web development skills, he takes interest in integrating SAS with other applications and interfaces such as Python and JavaScript. Sundaresh has prior work experience with the General Electric Corporation through G.E. Capital International Services, Genpact, and with India's most influential industry body - the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). He holds a Master's degree in Economics from the Madras School of Economics, Anna University. Sundaresh lives near Cary, N.C. with his wife, follows cricket and is interested in almost all sports, and likes to visualize himself exercising in his spare time. Sometimes he goes ahead and does exercise.

Jacob Siesser is a statistician at State Farm. His role focuses on predictive modeling for marketing and the life insurance business areas. He has been in his role since January, 2019. Prior, he was an intern in the MAGNet internship program at State Farm. Jacob earned his Bachelor's in Economics and Master's in Statistics from the University of Illinois.

Gabe Taylor has been a P&C Actuarial Intern at State Farm for the past three semesters. He is a senior studying Statistics at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. The last two projects he has worked on at State Farm have been exclusively in SAS, including SAS Studio 9.4 and SAS Viya. These projects revolved around predictive modeling and machine learning interpretation.