Chair:
Matt Brems
Hello! My name is Matt Brems (he/him), and I currently serve on SWB's Executive Committee as Chair. Professionally, I am senior manager of data science product & strategy with DataRobot and I run BetaVector, a data science consultancy. My full-time professional data work spans computer vision, finance, education, consumer-packaged goods, and politics. I'm affiliated with General Assembly as a member of their faculty and received General Assembly’s first 'Distinguished Faculty Member of the Year' award out of over 20,000 instructors. I earned my Master’s degree in statistics from Ohio State. I volunteer as a mentor to early- and mid-career data folks through various organizations, including the Washington Statistical Society and Civic Digital Fellows. I began volunteering with SWB in early 2018. Before serving as Chair, I've served as SWB's Vice Chair, our Director of Marketing & Communications, our Acting Director of Operations, and our Project & Client Managers Lead.
My three goals for Statistics Without Borders are simple:
- Increase the impact of SWB's work by increasing our number of projects and unique clients.
- More effectively showcase SWB's impact by developing a world-class marketing & communications (MarComm) program.
- Increase the quality of volunteer engagement with SWB.
I have worked on these goals in tandem with our Executive Committee for the last two and a half years and I look forward to continuing to do so. Our organization has scaled up the number of projects we complete annually, currently completing over 30 projects in a given year. Related, we have grown our Project & Client Management team from 8 to over 40 to handle more projects, part of which occurred during my tenure as Lead of the Project & Client Managers. I, in conjunction with our new Director of MarComm, have grown our MarComm team from 2 to 6, enabling us to do a lot more. This includes guest editing an edition of CHANCE Magazine in partnership with DataKind (which included four articles written by SWB volunteers about SWB work), publishing two articles about SWB projects in Amstat News, hosting monthly networking and education events for volunteers, and promoting our annual SWB meetings to great success. I am working on getting more volunteers involved in SWB work and, as someone who deeply cares about mentoring, am personally invested in ensuring volunteers who want to contribute to the greater good have an opportunity to do so. We have accomplished a great deal in the last two and a half years. I look forward to continuing this important work and would truly appreciate it if you honor me with your support.