Tyler Rinker is a data scientist with 12 years of experience.  Tyler recently joined Kangarootime and currently is helping to shape the company's data science and analytics vision, leading an amazing team of experienced data scientists.  Kangarootime's data scientists work on cross functional teams with software developers, UX designers and product managers to make Early Childhood Education business owners and leaders more effective.  Before that he led the data science team at Anthology/Campus Labs (2015-2022) to develop data-smart products that harness the collective power of data to make the higher ed experience more meaningful.  He also teaches courses at the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) and develops open-source analysis tools.  Prior to this Tyler was an elementary and middle school teacher.  He completed his Doctorate of Philosophy in Curriculum, Instruction, and the Science of Learning at UB with a Certificate of Advanced Study (CAS) in statistics, where he developed methods to investigate the intersections of people, language, action, and environment. He holds a CAS in Educational Leadership and an MS in Childhood & Early Childhood Curriculum & Instruction from Buffalo State College.

Fun Fact:

The first time Tyler interacted with a programming language, he expected that he could just type natural language into the terminal and the computer would convert it into something useful.  After 15 minutes of straight error messages, he shut the terminal and didn't open it again for over a month.

Kevin Chang is a seasoned data scientist tackling the challenges of higher education at Anthology, Inc. Kevin started as a civil engineer but then fell in love with data and switched his career to the data science field. He graduated from the data science program at the University at Buffalo and he has been in the DS field for 2.5 years. Kevin enjoys working with all kinds of problems especially during early phase including understanding the problems, identifying challenges, and breaking them into achievable steps.

Fun Fact: 

Kevin once flew around the world to collect data of a three-story building that was damaged by an earthquake, only to arrive to find they removed the third story and no data could be acquired.

Jillian Shepard is an experienced data scientist with over 9 years specializing in the software development industry. Jillian currently focuses on business intelligence at Kangarootime. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2013 and has a master’s degree in Data Science and Analytics from SUNY Buffalo State. Some of her favorite projects have ranged from analyzing irregular supply chain patterns to assessing characteristics of successful higher education institutions. Jillian has an affinity for working in education and child development industries.

Fun Fact:

When she is not fastidiously organizing data and making the case for good data governance practices, Jillian enjoys making overly elaborate costumes for Halloween.

Vi Ly is an experienced data scientist with over 10 years experience, primarily in banking and financial crimes domains. He has worked in analytical roles for multiple Fortune 500 companies including M&T Bank, USAA, and Meta (Facebook). Prior to becoming a data scientist, he served as meteorologist in the US Air Force and quality manager in optics manufacturing. Vi enjoys coding, especially in refactoring into cleaner code.

Fun Fact:

Vi can speak Russian!

Coming Soon!

Fun Fact:

Coming soon!