Kristiana Reed
Performance Analyst
Location:
Galveston Island, Texas
About:
In her role as Performance Analyst at Optimal, Kristiana develops report automation techniques like OptiBot and databases that enable easy storage and access to important metrics. She’s a master of multiple programming languages—including R and Python—and monitoring tools (Rigor , Blue Triangle , SpeedCurve ) and their API implementations. And as if that weren’t enough, she also reports and consults on A/B testing results for The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. using Google Optimize and Google Analytics.
After a brief foray into Aerospace Engineering, Kristiana switched to Astronomy with a minor in Mathematics. While writing her undergraduate thesis, she fell in love with data analysis, studying the Perseid meteor shower using Snow Telemetry radio frequencies.
Upon graduating, Kristiana landed a job as a data analyst in the pharmaceutical industry. It was her first introduction to data science. She happily spent her days designing pricing algorithms that automatically put items on sale or adjusted according to market trends. She also used linear regression to predict the weights of future shipments with over 80% accuracy and developed a model to recommend products to customers using R and k-means clustering.
Astronomy is still close to Kristiana’s heart, but the diversity of data science and its applications is where her passion lies.
Something you may not know about Kristiana is that she barrel-raced as a child—even riding a world champion horse in one competition. A woman of many talents, she also worked in a small mom-and-pop chocolate-making business during college.
Favorite color:
Orange. It never gets any love
Favorite animal:
Giraffe
Bucket list destination:
Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, for the possibility of alien life
Education:
M.S., Data Science, Maryville University
B.A., Astronomy (Minor in Mathematics), Embry Riddle Aeronautical University