Speakers

2019 Speakers

Duane Boning
Clarence J. LeBel Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Duane S. Boning is the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in Electrical Engineering, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in the EECS Department at MIT. He is affiliated with the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and serves as MTL Associate Director for Computation and CAD. He is also the Engineering Faculty Co-Director of the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program, serving in that role since September 2016. From 2004 to 2011, he served as Associate Head of the EECS Department at MIT. From 2011 through 2013 he was the Director/Faculty Lead of the MIT Skoltech Initiative, and from 2011 through July 2018, he was the faculty Director of the MIT/Masdar Institute Cooperative Program.

Dr. Boning received his S.B. degrees in electrical engineering and in computer science in 1984, and his S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering in 1986 and 1991, respectively, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an NSF Fellow from 1984 to 1989, and an Intel Graduate Fellow in 1990. From 1991 to 1993 he was a Member Technical Staff at the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Process and Design Center in Dallas, Texas, where he worked on semiconductor process representation, process/device simulation tool integration, and statistical modeling and optimization.

Dr. Boning is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has served as Editor in Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing, and as chairman of the CFI/Technology CAD Framework Semiconductor Process Representation Working Group. He is a member of the IEEE, Electrochemical Society, Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi, Materials Research Society, Sigma Xi, and the Association of Computing Machinery.

Jimmy Buffi
Senior Analyst, Pitching Department, Los Angeles Dodgers

SPEAKER BIO

Jimmy Buffi is a Senior Analyst for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and their lead pitching researcher. His primary job is to study the biomechanics of pitching, and then to use what he learns to help the coaches and players both improve performance and reduce injury risk. His research areas include the aerodynamics of ball flight (for example, fastball movement vs curveball movement) and the musculoskeletal dynamics of the pitching motion. He has helped many pitchers increase the effectiveness of their pitching deliveries. As part of this work, Jimmy has been responsible for implementing many new technologies into the Dodgers’ organization that help them measure the movement of the human body and the baseball.

Since childhood, Jimmy has been enamored with using math and science to improve athletic performance. When he was in little league learning to pitch for the first time, he bought a book on the science of pitching. He used what he learned from the book to become one of the first children his age to throw a curveball. This allowed him to make the little league all-star team and carried him all the way through varsity high school baseball.

Jimmy attended the University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate education, where he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He then attended Northwestern University, where he received his PhD in Biomedical Engineering. His doctoral dissertation was called, “Using Biomechanical Modeling and Simulation to Calculate Potential Muscle Contributions to the Elbow Varus Moment during Baseball Pitching.” He has also been a visiting scholar in the National Center for Simulation in Rehabilitation Research at Stanford University as well as a visiting researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital. When he is not studying math, science, or sports, Jimmy enjoys playing guitar and writing music.

Christina Chase
Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Co-founder & Managing Director, MIT Sports Lab

SPEAKER BIO

Christina Chase is a Lecturer at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2015, she co-founded the MIT Sports Lab with Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and serves as its Managing Director. Prior to this she was the first Entrepreneur in Residence at MIT through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Christina has helped hundreds of teams go from concept to company. In 2013, she was named one of the 25 Most Influential Women in the Boston Tech Community and in 2014, Mashable named her one of the 15 People Shaping Boston’s Tech Scene. In a past life, Christina was a cyclist where she was one of 12 women selected by the US Cycling Federation to train at the US Olympic Training Center. She has taught downhill skiing in Colorado, summited six of Colorado’s 14-ers across seasons, and her latest sport is kiteboarding. Christina is a Techstars mentor and serves on the Board of the MIT Enterprise Forum, is a judge for the SXSW Accelerator Competition and former Advisory Board member.

Nick Davis
Special Assistant - Baseball Research and Development, Milwaukee Brewers

SPEAKER BIO

Nick Davis currently serves as the Special Assistant for Baseball Research and Development at the Milwaukee Brewers. In this role, he assists with various projects across baseball operations areas with a focus on data analysis and automation. He joined the Brewers full-time after graduating in June 2014 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in Math and Computer Science, where he played both baseball and basketball.

Munther Dahleh
Director, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; Professor, Electrical Engineering Computer Science, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Dahleh is interested in Networked Systems with applications to Social and Economic Networks, financial networks, Transportation Networks, Neural Networks, and the Power Grid. Specifically, he focuses on the development of foundational theory necessary to understand, monitor, and control systemic risk in interconnected systems. He is also interested in learning high dimensional unstructured stochastic systems from finite data. His recent work focused on understanding the economics of data as well as deriving a foundational theory for data markets. His work draws from various fields including algorithmic game theory, optimal control, distributed online optimization, information theory, and distributed learning. His collaborations include faculty from all five schools at MIT.

Nicolas Evans
Head of Football Research & Standards, FIFA

SPEAKER BIO

Nicolas is the Head of Football Research & Standards within FIFA’s Technical Innovation Department. In this role he oversees the entire standards creation process from definition of needs, research design and execution to implementation as global standards for football stakeholders. He leads a multi-disciplinary team consisting of engineers, data scientists and industry experts that works with more than 150 stakeholders on a daily basis.

Nicolas has championed the role of science in sport following two Master’s degrees in International Affairs and Governance from the University of St. Gallen and a summa cum laude degree in Finance & Strategy at the Institut d’Etudes Politique de Paris. Applying research methods and his understanding of institutional dynamics has been key to forging successful partnerships with industry, research and football stakeholders to improve the game of football using data-driven decision-making processes.

Besides family, Nicolas’ hobbies include a variety of sports and long-distance running.

Cory Frontin
Ph.D. Candidate, Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

By day, Cory Frontin is a Ph.D. student in aeronautics, working on next-generation adaptive numerical methods for computational fluid dynamics. But under the cover of night (when his research advisor isn't around to notice), he has been moonlighting in baseball analytics. His primary sports research interests are the application of uncertainty quantification methods to baseball problems, which was the subject of his 2019 Saberseminar talk and proceeding guest columns in Baseball Prospectus. For now, he's mostly working on the old thesis, and also trying to bring home an intramural hockey championship for the AeroAstro graduate students.

Sarah Fay
Ph.D. Candidate, Mechanical Engineering MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Sarah is currently a graduate student working with Peko Hosoi. Her current project is about the modeling the biomechanics of running for designing running shoes (in collaboration with adidas). In the past, she's worked on optimizing racket weight distribution for power hitting. She played field hockey and squash at MIT as an undergraduate and is now an assistant coach of the MIT field hockey team.

Katherine Gallagher
AI Software Engineer, MIT Quest for Intelligence

SPEAKER BIO

Katherine Gallagher is an AI Software Engineer at the MIT Quest for Intelligence – Bridge, where she designs and constructs customized tools that make advances in machine learning and cognitive science accessible to a general audience. Gallagher’s work is informed by her background in machine learning for financial applications at State Street Corporation and for cognitive science research at Harvard University.

Christopher Halpin
EVP/Chief Strategy & Growth Officer, National Football League

SPEAKER BIO

Christopher Halpin is the EVP/Chief Strategy & Growth Officer of the National Football League. In his role, Chris and his team drive League-wide strategy, long-range planning and Data & Analytics. He also oversees key growth areas for the NFL, including managing the League’s rapidly expanding International business and leading its activities in legalized sports betting.

Prior to his current role, Chris was SVP—Consumer Products & Licensing, overseeing the League’s gaming, apparel, hardlines and e-commerce businesses. Before that, he was the VP of Media Strategy & Business Development, charged with growing the League’s Media business through TV partners, digital/OTT opportunities and NFL Media (NFL Network, RedZone and Digital).

Prior to joining the NFL in June 2013, Chris was a Partner and Managing Director at Providence Equity Partners. During his 13 years at Providence, Chris worked across the firm’s investment activities in the Media & Entertainment, Wireless/Satellite and Business Services sectors, and also opened and served as Co-Head of Providence’s Hong Kong office. Chris started his career in the Merchant Banking Division of Goldman Sachs.

Chris is a graduate of Princeton University with an A.B. in Economics (Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude), and is a board member of the Children’s Scholarship Fund, the Western Golf Association Evans Scholarship Fund, and Good Sports New York.

Andy Harland
Professor of Sports Technology & Associate Dean for Enterprise, Loughborough University

SPEAKER BIO

Professor Harland is active in research across a broad range of topics related to sport, including measurement and instrumentation in sport, product design and development, injury prevention and simulation.

A number of projects have been concerned with sports footwear, apparel, protective gear and hard-goods, with particular focus on a wide range of hollow and solid sports balls. He has supervised over 20 PhD students.

Professor Harland’s research in soccer balls has been applied by adidas in tournament balls used in FIFA world cups since 2006 and UEFA European Championships since 2004 and his research in cricket helmet impacts underpinned the revision of the British Standard 7928:2013; Specification for Head Protection for Cricketers.

Professor Harland has partnered with a wide range of industrial, commercial and charitable bodies, including adidas, FIFA, England and Wales Cricket Board, International Cricket Council, BISFed and FIH.

Professor Harland has also supported a number of start-up businesses including Alcuris, Incus, Nymbl and Shot Scope and is keen to support ideas through to commercialisation.

Seung Kyun (SK) Ha
Ph.D. Candidate, Chemical Engineering, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

SK is a graduate student studying Chemical Engineering at MIT and his research involves synthesis and applications of semiconductor nanocrystals. Originally from South Korea, he holds a B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering and a minor in Physics from Seoul National University. He enjoys working on sports data analytics projects in his spare time, including building a mathematical model that describes soccer dribble dynamics. He enjoys playing all sports, especially soccer, and holds U.S. Soccer grassroots coaching license.

Mark Henderson
Senior Director, Future Engineering, adidas

SPEAKER BIO

Mark Henderson has worked in engineering and innovation with adidas for 17 years. He is currently a Senior Engineering Director for the Future Team, where he leads a team of talented engineers working 3-7 years out on game changing ideas. Topics range from high performance product and athlete experiences to the future of manufacturing and sustainability. He has worked on or directed the engineering of several successful adidas technologies including: adidas 1, the world’s first intelligent shoe; adidas prime SP, the lightest sprint spike ever, and most recently the industry changing Futurecraft 4D, a high performance 3D-printed running shoe. Mark is originally from Tauranga, New Zealand and completed his honors degree in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Canterbury.

Anette (Peko) Hosoi
Associate Dean, School of Engineering; Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor, Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Co-founder, MIT Sports Lab

SPEAKER BIO

Anette “Peko” Hosoi is the Associate Dean of the MIT School of Engineering, the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Professor of Mathematics. Her research contributions lie at the junction of nonlinear hydrodynamics, biomechanics, and bio-inspired design. A common theme in her work is the fundamental study of shape, kinematic, and rheological optimization of biological systems with applications to the emergent field of soft robotics. More recently, she has turned her attention to problems that lie intersection of biomechanics, applied mathematics, and sports. She is the co-founder of the MIT Sports Lab which connects the MIT community with pro-teams and industry partners to address data and engineering challenges that lie within the sports domain. She has received numerous awards including the APS Stanley Corrsin Award, the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Jacob P. Den Hartog Distinguished Educator Award. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), a Radcliffe Institute Fellow, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow.

Amy Huchthausen
Commissioner, America East Conference

SPEAKER BIO

Amy Huchthausen serves as Commissioner of the America East Conference where she has increased the conference’s profile through progressive media partnerships and a robust social and digital media strategy.

Under her leadership, America East unveiled a comprehensive rebranding platform that led to new programs such as the #3Pillars Academy, Alumni Network, Academic Consortium and the league’s Health & Safety initiative. Additionally, the conference is a diversity and inclusion leader through its groundbreaking partnerships with the You Can Play Project, LGBT SportSafe and RISE that are the foundation of its Spread Respect campaign.

She has served on the Women Leaders in College Sports Board of Directors and numerous NCAA committees during her career. She is currently active in the Stadia Ventures community. Notably, she was recognized as a 2016 Forty Under 40 honoree by the Sports Business Journal.

Huchthausen has worked at the NCAA, ACC, Missouri Valley and Big East. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse where she played softball. In 2018, she received her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she was recognized by Poets & Quants as one of the Class of 2018’s Best & Brightest Executive MBAs in the country.

Stefanie Jegelka
X-Consortium Career Development Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Stefanie Jegelka is an X-Window Consortium Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of EECS at MIT. She is a member of the Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL), and an affiliate of IDSS and ORC at MIT. Before joining MIT, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Stefanie has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, the German Pattern Recognition Award and a Best Paper Award at ICML. Her research interests span multiple topics around the theory and practice of algorithmic machine learning, including discrete and continuous optimization, discrete probability, and learning with structured data.

Youzhi Liang
Ph.D. Candidate, Mechanical Engineering, MIT

Allen Lim
Founder, Skratch Labs

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Allen Lim received his doctorate from the Applied Exercise Science Laboratory at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His doctoral work focused on the use of portable power meters to better understand the demands associated with professional cycling. After graduating, Allen worked on the Pro Cycling Tour as a sport scientist and coach for the Phonak, Garmin, and Radio Shack professional cycling teams. After leaving the Pro Tour in 2012, he founded Skratch Labs - a sports nutrition company based in Boulder, CO, where he leads product development and innovation. He has also helped co-author three cookbooks with Chef Biju Thomas - the Feed Zone Cookbook, Feed Zone Portables, and the Feed Zone Table. In his spare time, Allen continues to coach and consult professional athletes like Tejay Van Garderen, Taylor Phinney, and Gwen Jorgensen.

Per Lundstam
Director of Athlete Performances, Red Bull North America

SPEAKER BIO

As the Director of Athlete Performances at Red Bull in Santa Monica Per supports athletes in their pursuit of improving athletic performance as well as building a platform for human exploration in performance. Per started with the Red Bull performance team in Jan, 2010 and has now been exposed to the very dynamic world of Red Bull for about 10 years.

Per’s career has included roles within different ski federations including sport science development within the US Ski & Snowboard association. Furthermore, Per worked within the Swedish Ski Federation in the early 90’s over a 4 year period.
Per lives in Park-City, UT with his wife Janet and one son Odin.

Caitlin Mueller
Associate Professor, Architecture; Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Caitlin Mueller is a researcher, designer, and educator working at the interface of architecture and structural engineering. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Building Technology Program, where she leads the Digital Structures research group.

As a researcher, Mueller focuses on developing new computational methods and tools for synthesizing architectural and structural intentions in early-stage design. She also works in the field of digital fabrication, with a focus on linking high structural performance with new methods of architectural making. In addition to her digital work, she conducts research on the nature of collaboration between architects and engineers from a historical perspective. Mueller also aims for interdisciplinary learning and integration in her teaching efforts, which include subjects in structural design and computational methods.

Santhosh Narayan
Co-Founder and CEO, Live Sports Markets; MIT Sports Lab

Jeff Ota
Member of the Innovation Board, San Jose Earthquakes

Steve Palmer
Head of Data Solutions, The Premier League

SPEAKER BIO

Head of Data Solutions at The Premier League, England. A role which involves supporting the member clubs to innovate with Performance Systems, Technology and Data.

After graduating from Christ’s College, Cambridge University with a degree in Software Engineering, an 18 year Professional playing career totalled 587 games in the Premier League and Championship with Ipswich, Watford and QPR. On retiring, 5 years were spent as Performance Manager within the Academy at Tottenham Hotspur FC before joining The Premier League in 2012.

Nick Peirce
Chief Medical Officer, England and Wales Cricket Board

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Nick Peirce is the Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales Cricket Board, Head of Service as an NHS Consultant in Sport and Exercise Medicine at Nottingham University Hospital and Honorary Clinical Professor in Sport and Exercise Medicine at Loughborough University.

Originally trained in Family Medicine, Dr. Peirce moved into Sport and Exercise Medicine in 1995 and was appointed as a Consultant in 2001 following an MSc in Sports Medicine, a 2 year Lectureship at Nottingham University, and an overseas Sports Medicine Fellowship at the Australian Institute of Sport.

He has worked extensively with all aspects of medical care for athletes including 7 years as Lead Physician for the English Institute of Sport at Loughborough University, CMO for GB World Class Canoeing Program 1997-2017, Great Britain Rowing, Team GB and for LTA Great Britain Davis Cup team 2001-2007, until moving to cricket full time. Dr Peirce has attended Olympics and Commonwealth Games. He also spent 17 yrs as Lead Sports Physician for Nottingham Forest Football Club. He was awarded the British Association of Sports Medicine travelling scholarship in 1998 and with the ECB has of collection of awards including the BMJ award for Sport and Exercise Medicine Team of the year in 2013.

He now combines clinical care, research and leadership in relation to Duty of Care in Sport, ‘Prevention’ / Moving Medicine Healthcare in the NHS, including the establishment of the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine. Additional roles have included Training Program lead, Chair of National Recruitment and Workforce planning, Council member for the Faculty for SEM and SAC and international activities include consensus and advisory panels, editorial Boards for journals and international Medical Committees. He currently supervises 7 Phds at Loughborough, Bath, Birmingham and Bangor University looking at mental health, injury surveillance, osteoarthritis in sport, biomechanics, stress fractures and bone health in athletes, concussion and helmet design as well as interests in metabolic medicine and diabetes and exercise.

Nick Repole
Director of Research and Development, San Antonio Spurs

SPEAKER BIO

Nick Repole is set to begin his fourth season in San Antonio after previously serving as director of basketball information systems. Prior to joining the Spurs he spent two seasons with the Charlotte Hornets, where he served as the basketball operations systems developer and quantitative analyst. Before making the move to Charlotte, the University of Michigan graduate was an associate product development specialist for Eagle Investment Systems.

Jason Robins
Co-Founder and CEO, DraftKings

SPEAKER BIO

Jason Robins is Chief Executive Officer of DraftKings, which he co-founded in 2012. Under his leadership, DraftKings has become a leading sports technology company, including the world’s largest fantasy sports product and an early leader in the emerging sports betting industry. Mr. Robins has lead efforts at DraftKings to work with policy makers as well as drive wide-ranging partnerships. Mr. Robins has been recognized on the cover of Fortune’s 2015 “40 Under 40,” and in Boston Business Journal’s “Power 50: Game Changers,” among others. He holds a degree in Economics and Computer Science from Duke University.

Eric Schmidt
Staff Developer Advocate, Google Cloud

SPEAKER BIO

Eric Schmidt is a Staff Developer Advocate for Google Cloud. His primary focus is enabling data science and data analysis workflows within the sports and retailing industries. Prior to his advocacy work Schmidt was the founding Product Manager for Cloud Dataflow a unified service for large scale batch and stream processing. His portfolio of work includes engagements for: World Cup (2014, 2018), World Series 2016, NCAA March Madness (2013, 2018), Olympics (2008, 2010, 2012), NBC Sunday Night Football (2009, 2010, 2011), Home Depot, Spotify, Target, Zillow, Disney, Sephora, and Zulily. Prior to joining Google Schmidt was a Sr. Director at Microsoft and a managing consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Devavrat Shah
Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Director, Statistics and Data Science Center, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Devavrat Shah is a Professor with the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of Statistics and Data Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His current research interests are at the interface of Statistical Inference and Social Data Processing. His work has been recognized through prize paper awards in Machine Learning, Operations Research and Computer Science, as well as career prizes 2008 ACM Sigmetrics Rising Star Award, 2010 Erlang prize from the INFORMS Applied Probability Society and 2019 ACM Sigmetrics Test of Time Paper Award. He is a distinguished young alumni of his alma mater IIT Bombay. He has co-authored monographs “Gossip algorithms” and “Explaining the success of nearest neighbors in prediction’’. He co-founded machine learning start-up Celect, Inc. which is now part of Nike, Inc.

Dennis Shen
Ph.D. Candidate, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Dennis is a graduate student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department working with Devavrat Shah. His research involves machine learning and high-dimensional statistics with applications to causal inference, time series analysis, and, more recently, sports analytics. Specifically, he is interested in forecasting cricket and NBA player/team performances. During his time at MIT, he has also interned at Facebook Research within the Core Data Science group.

Ben Shields
Senior Lecturer, Sloan School of Management, MIT

SPEAKER BIO

Ben Shields is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He studies the multibillion-dollar sports industry to identify broadly transferable management lessons in areas such as leadership communication, data-driven decision making, and innovation.

He is the author or coauthor of three books, Social Media Management: Persuasion in Networked Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016), The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders for a High Performance Industry (Oxford University Press, 2015), and The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports in a Crowded Marketplace (McGraw-Hill, 2006).

His other sports work at MIT includes co-hosting “Counterpoints,” the sports analytics podcast from the MIT Sloan Management Review, and teaching in the MIT Sports Entrepreneurship Bootcamp program, which is offered through MIT’s Office of Open Learning.

Prior to MIT, Shields served as the Director of Social Media and Marketing at ESPN. He oversaw social media strategy for the ESPN brand and collaborated across the enterprise to develop and implement company-wide social strategy. He also worked on marketing strategy for several ESPN brands and sub-brands, including the SportsCenter “DaDaDa” campaign and the Emmy Award-winning “It’s Not Crazy, It’s Sports” brand campaign.

Kevin Vanslette
Postdoctoral Associate, Mechanical Engineering, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), MIT

Ferran Vidal-Codina
Research Scientist, MIT Sports Lab

SPEAKER BIO

Ferran Vidal-Codina is a research scientist in the MIT Sports Lab. He is currently spearheading the MIT-FIFA collaboration, with a focus on developing algorithms and methodology to address some of the current challenges and limitations that FIFA faces for automatic data collection. Prior to that, Ferran came to MIT in 2011, supported by a La Caixa fellowship, to complete a S.M. in Computation for Design and Optimization, and in 2017 earned the Ph.D. in Computational Science and Engineering. His Ph.D. research focused on developing numerical methods to simulate the interaction of electromagnetic waves with metals at the nanoscale, a work he continued for two years as a postdoctoral associate in the Aero Astro department. Besides from science, Ferran’s main interests are in soccer and traveling.