Huddle Leaders
Sonia has over a decade of experience in data analytics and data engineering. In her current role, Sonia leads the data team at Elevate Labs, a cross-functional team supporting the entire organization. Over her career, she has spearheaded efforts to modernize data pipelines and analytical infrastructure, implement analytics into critical business decisions, and establish and integrate data best practices. She has also worked pro bono with numerous non-profits to automate reporting and revamp their data infrastructure.
Sonia enjoys reading and has picked up cooking as a hobby during quarantine. She lives in NYC. Catch her on Twitter @ohiosonia.
Michael Helbling is a founding partner of Stacked Analytics, a community of experts helping organizations solve the most complex data and analytics problems. Michael is an internationally known digital analytics expert and speaker. He has built analytics programs as both a consultant and industry practitioner.
In his 16 years in the industry he has led both technical and functional analytics projects and initiatives. He currently serves on the board of the Digital Analytics Association, and he is the co-host of the popular industry podcast, The Digital Analytics Power Hour.
Caitlin holds a BA in Economics and Women's Studies from the College of William and Mary.
Alexis uses curiosity, skepticism, empathy, and creativity to help people make data-informed decisions. She specializes in applying visualization, modeling, and analysis to separating symptoms from causes, expanding on ideas, and making the complex approachable.
Celina is currently the Director of Analytics and Strategic Insights at TULA (NY- based startup for probiotics skincare and health/wellness). She has led and built Data/Analytics teams in the last 4 years for startups in the B2B and B2C space ranging from open-spacing furniture to marketing tech. Prior to the startup world, Celina has had 8 years of corporate experience -- 6 years at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in corporate finance supporting sales/trading, wealth management and credit lending and 2 years at American Express in marketing analytics and finance.
Outside of work, Celina is on the Board of Directors for the University of Michigan Alumni Club of NYC. She is a volunteer for her alma mater’s alumni NYC chapter, which provides a community for alumni and fundraises for an annual scholarship that helps talented incoming freshmen who have a financial gap.
Aurélie Pols designs data privacy best practices: documenting data flows, minimising risk related to data uses, solving for data quality. She spent over two decades optimising digital data-based decision-making processes. She co-founded and sold her start-up to Digitas LBi (Publicis). Used to following the money to optimise data trails, she follows data to minimise risks, touching upon security practices and ethical data uses.
She leads her own consultancy, Aurélie Pols & Associates, serves as DPO for NY-based CDP mParticle and was part of the EDPS’ EAG. She has been teaching Privacy & Ethics at IE Business School in Madrid for six years, supports DPO training courses for Maastricht University, is part of their ECPC board, supported IEEE’s P7002 and serves as Ethics advisor for H2020/Horizon Europe projects.
Andrea Mestriner, Global Head of Analytics, Marketing & Customer Products, YOOX NET A PORTER GROUP
Andrea Mestriner has over 14 years’ experience in the ecommerce domain spanning technology, product management, data and analytics. Andrea founded his product recommendation start-up in the US. In 2009 Expedia acquired his company. Subsequently, he joined Expedia where he fulfilled a host of roles in platform technology integration, product management (both customer and supplier focus) and finally in website and mobile apps optimisation where he had an active part in building the data platform to enable a fast integration of various datasets from the different tools used to monitor customer feedback, customer experience, website/apps performance to identify “frictions” to purchase and increase revenue and customer satisfaction.
While at Expedia he cultivated his interest in customer and marketing analytics and the need to apply a growth mindset to this domain.
Andrea then joined European tech giant Just Eat where he held the role of Head of Data Analytics, Visualisation & Experimentation. At Just Eat he built a team of 24 professionals covering all aspects of analytics and visualisation. He also developed the company’s experimentation centre of excellence from scratch.
Currently he is the Global Head of Analytics for online high fashion retailer YOOX NET A PORTER GROUP. He is tasked with transforming the group’s analytics and digital marketing infrastructure to enable more effective data utilisation and a customer-led sales strategy.
Gary George drives enterprise-wide metadata strategies that help companies get the most from the data they produce. In his current role at Indeed he leads a team of product managers focused on privacy compliance, data cataloging, and resource metadata. Previously, Gary spent 15 years at Intuit where he led teams in analytics, business intelligence, data engineering, with his last role being a product manager for clickstream strategy and metadata management.
Gary holds a BS in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Santa Clara University.
Casandra leads Experimentation & Analysis at Shopify, the all-in-one commerce platform that powers over a million businesses worldwide. Her team supports efficient growth through data analysis, measurement strategy, conversion research, and controlled experimentation.
Previously, Casandra specialized in inbound marketing and was the Managing Editor of the Shopify Blog. During her time as Managing Editor, her data-driven approach helped increase email subscribers by +417% and customers acquired through the Shopify Blog by +278%. Outside of Shopify, Casandra has grown multiple businesses, including a brewing company, and taught a range of digital marketing topics, including search engine marketing and business analytics.
Ole is Head of Metadata & Integrations at JustWatch, the free streaming guide app which he has recently joined from Astana Rebel, a Berlin-based start-up for a healthy lifestyle. He is a seasoned digital strategist and analyst who has been working with information technologies since 2001, particularly with start-up technology companies. He spent four years at SoundCloud, the world’s leading audio platform, leading a team of analysts and building the analytics and business intelligence infrastructure. Prior to that he was VP of Insight at EyeEm, a Berlin mobile photography start-up, before working as a freelancer for various start-ups and agencies.
Ole has a degree in Applied System Science from the University of Osnabrück.
June Dershewitz has spent her career driving analytics strategies for major businesses. In her current role at Amazon she guides strategy and execution across Amazon Music's portfolio of data science, machine learning, analytics, and business intelligence initiatives. As an analytics practitioner she has built and led teams that focus on marketing analytics, product analytics, data engineering, and data governance. In her prior life as a consultant she was a member of the leadership team at Semphonic, a prominent analytics consultancy (now part of Ernst & Young).
As a long-standing advocate of the analytics community, she was the co-founder of Web Analytics Wednesdays, and she currently serves as Board Vice President of the Digital Analytics Association.
She holds a BA in Mathematics from Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Scott Breitenother is an investor and advisor who specializes in building data driven organizations. He currently leads Brooklyn Data Co., a consultancy offering full-stack data and analytics team as a service.
He was employee #16 at direct-to-consumer mattress start-up Casper and founded the company’s industry-leading Data & Analytics team. In a former life, Scott was a Management Consultant at L.E.K. Consulting (which is probably where he developed his love of frameworks and structure).
He has a BS in Business Management from Babson College and a MSc in International Management from London School of Economics. When he’s not blogging about analytics trends at LocallyOptimistic, you can find him walking around Brooklyn with his wife and children.
Pubudu Wariyapola is an analytics leader with over 15 years of software, product and data science experience. He has a highly technical education background with degrees in Physics (F&M) and Ocean Engineering (MIT) complemented with an entrepreneur-focused MBA (UCLA).
He spent the early part of his career as a software engineer/architect at the Allstate Insurance Company, followed by roles in product management sandwiching his MBA degree. Pubudu moved to the analytics field in 2009 and worked primarily in the B2C space (ProFlowers, One Kings Lane, Amazon, Fivestars) until taking on his current role building and running analytics for Upwork.
Joe is the Director of Analytics within the BI Group at PBS, where he is responsible for providing actionable, data-driven insights about children’s media and education throughout the organization as well as leading on data visualization and data literacy initiatives.
Prior to joining PBS, Joe managed cross-network advanced platform analysis for AMC Networks. He is a co-leader of the Digital Analytics Association, Washington D.C. chapter and the DAA’s Practitioner of the Year for 2018.
Joe holds a MSc in Library & Information Science from Long Island University and a BA in Public Relations from Susquehanna University.
Joy Wendelken is currently working at Johnson & Johnson in the role of Senior Manager, Omnichannel Operations. She is working to establish the Omnichannel Operations function within Janssen Pharmaceuticals and will drive development and execution of digital omnichannel marketing programs. Joy has been with Johnson & Johnson for over 6 years and started her career at J&J in the Consumer Health division as a Manager of Digital Analytics. In that role, she implemented a standardized digital analytics practice for over 400 global consumer websites and mobile apps. Additionally, she trained brand marketers to use data to optimize their digital properties.
She has over 15 years of experience in digital marketing and over 10 years of experience in digital analytics. She started her career in the digital marketing field by learning to develop websites in an evolving digital marketing field. After becoming an expert in Urchin (later acquired by Google to become Google Analytics), she used that expertise to start a career in digital analytics. She has worked for a wide array of companies including Pearson Education, Realogy, Avaya and Avis Budget Group. She has expertise in Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, A/B testing, and website/mobile app development.
Joy received her undergraduate degree in Marketing from The College of New Jersey. She lives in Hillsborough, NJ with her husband Mark and 3 children Bryce (11), Landon (8), and Charlotte (2).
Tim has been working with digital data full-time since 2001 in a variety of roles: from managing a web analytics platform migration and developing analytics processes as the head of the business intelligence department at a $500 million high tech B2B company; to creating and growing the analytics practices at three different agencies that worked with a range of large consumer brands; to consulting with the digital analytics teams at Fortune 500 companies on the their strategies, processes, and tactics for effectively putting their digital data to actionable use.
Tim is a long-time creator of pragmatic content for analysts and marketers, including co-hosting the bi-weekly Digital Analytics Power Hour podcast (analyticshour.io) and co-creating dartistics.com — a site dedicated to encouraging analysts to learn the R programming language and apply statistical methods to their data.
Tim is physically based in Columbus, Ohio, while his heart and soul maintain joint custody with Austin, Texas.
Amy Sample has been analyzing digital consumer behavior for nearly 20 years. As VP Business Intelligence at PBS, she and her team support analytics and digital research initiatives for PBS.org, PBSKIDS.org, and PBS mobile and OTT apps. Her team also provides analytics and SEO consultations for PBS member stations. Prior to PBS, she conducted primary research and audience analysis at AOL for 8 years. She is a member of the Board of Directors for the Digital Analytics Association and co-leader of the DAA Washington DC chapter. Amy holds an MBA from Georgetown University and a BS in Marketing from DePaul University.
Rusty has over 17 years of experience driving digital strategy, technology program planning, and delivery in financial services and health care. Since 2013 Rusty had been leading enterprise class digital intelligence programs responsible for designing and delivering modernized MarTech platforms, building out and leading digital community of practice and Digital Centers of Excellence, and helping the enterprise sustainably transform its operations around the digital marketing and automation capabilities. Rusty is also is an active member of the DAA’s Corporate Membership Advisory Council.
Sharon currently is Lead Digital Analytics Consultant at InfoTrust focused on the retail sector. Sharon comes to {Conference} with almost 20 years of experience in the Media and Digital spaces, including BMO, Millward Brown (Director of Digital Strategy & Effectiveness), TVO (Director of Research), Astral Media (Head of Research & Director of Interactive Research), CBC (Research Manager), and The Canadian Media Fund (Statistical and Economic Analyst).
Her experience also traces back to print media, sales, and academic roles in her native Dublin where she completed her degree in economics from Trinity College Dublin and Master in Media Studies from the Dublin Institute of technology. A life long learner Sharon is passionate about digital analytics and its role in driving organisations forward.
As a Solutions Engineer at ObservePoint, Chris helps large enterprises set up automated testing of their analytics scripts with ObservePoint so they can verify custom website tracking is always up and running.
Roopa leverages her vast experience leading testing and personalization campaigns, with a strong background in lead generation and ecommerce. She has proven success gathering insights from user testing, site metrics, and industry trends to improve UX and personalization, increasing conversions and helping her clients EVOLVE their organizations.
Guido is a cognitive psychologist and usability specialist focused on E-commerce. As a freelance consultant he helps companies to build international customer experience optimization teams and to build a culture around experimentation and validation in the whole company.
Since 2008 Guido’s work included many Magento projects, he is a Magento Master for 2019 and is part of the Board of Directors for the international Magento Association. Since 2019 he also hosts the popular weekly CRO.CAFE podcast in which he extracts the most valuable tips from optimization experts. Guido is often invited to speak at international events about persuasion, e-commerce, conversion optimization and experimentation cultures.
Kelly Wortham – Director of Optimization, Search Discovery Inc.
Kelly Wortham is Director of Optimization at Search Discovery Inc. (SDI), a digital intelligence company that empowers organizations to make transformative business decisions. Kelly has worked with Fortune 500 companies and mid-size organizations for more than 15 years to build and optimize best in class digital experimentation programs. She focuses her advisory services on digital CRO strategy and experimentation program and process design and optimization. She has deep functional knowledge in CRO strategy, communication and digital analytics. She also has expertise in testing prioritization and roadmap strategy, organization and process design as well as quality management, tool selection and integration. Kelly’s clients are currently working with her to develop new or optimize existing testing programs, evaluate or improve test idea pipelines, and assess program maturity.
Ton is the founder of Online Dialogue – thought leaders in evidence-based growth. Ton has 20 years of experience in maximizing online revenues and with his team he helps and trains companies throughout the world to be effective at data-informed growth. He is also recognized worldwide as an influential thinker, writer and public speaker on conversion optimization and digital experiments.
Ton is the founder of the Dutch Webanalisten.nl community and the international Conversion Hotel Conference.
As Senior Director, Analytics Strategy for Blast Analytics, Aimee applies her vast analytics, project management, and leadership experience to help our client teams deliver the best analytics consulting solutions possible. Specifically, she works closely with clients to develop reports and analyze data, identify trends and relationships between different types of data, draw appropriate conclusions, and translate findings into marketing and sales strategies that drive revenue.
Aimee holds a BA in Mathematical Sciences from University of Illinois, Springfield.
Ashish Braganza is executive vice president of Data, Analytics, and Innovation at LPL Financial, where he’s responsible for transforming data into a strategic firm asset, developing a strong data quality/governance plan, and integrating analytics-based solutions into LPL’s DNA.
Mr. Braganza has more than a decade of experience building and running impactful data analytics teams at Fortune 500 companies in asset management, technology, and media/telecom. Most recently, he was senior vice president and head of Client Insights and Analytics at OppenheimerFunds Inc., where he was responsible for developing and applying advanced methods within data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and computational computing.
Prior to OppenheimerFunds, Mr. Braganza held analytics leadership roles at Lenovo and Comcast Corp. At Lenovo, he scaled advanced analytics across the enterprise and managed cross-functional technology teams to support firm initiatives.
Mr. Braganza has published numerous case studies on data analytics and is frequently invited to speak at leading industry events. He’s been nominated for multiple awards and is an active member of the Digital Analytics Association. Mr. Braganza received a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in marketing from the University of Pune in India and a master’s degree in marketing management from Fox School of Business at Temple University.
As Associate Director in Disney Media Distribution, Amber is responsible for shaping analytics team priorities, and leading staff education and professional development. Her team drives linear and digital measurement integrations with distribution partners across The Walt Disney Company's portfolio of media networks (Disney Channel, Disney Jr., Disney XD, ABC, Freeform, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3, ACC, SEC, ESPNU, ESPNews, ESPN Deportes, FX, FXX, FXM, National Geographic, and Nat Geo Wild).
Amber has moderated/presented at various analytics conferences including the DA Hub and several Digital Analytics Association Symposia. She has also featured in the Genetics in Medicine and Applied Marketing Analytics journals.
Amber holds a Bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MBA from George Washington University.
Jose Maldonado is a data and analytics leader at Verizon. His analytics experience spans over a decade across different functions including Finance, Digital Marketing, Pricing & Promotions, New Products & Innovation, and currently in Marketing Effectiveness where the group measures the ROI of marketing efforts across the organization.
Jose spent most of his career in Marketing Analytics performing work across data strategy, data engineering, and business intelligence. Jose earned a Black Belt in Verizon’s Lean Six Sigma program for delivering process improvement projects that eliminate waste, cut cost, and increase revenue for the business.
He is well versed in SQL, R and Tableau among other tools and technologies. He has a passion for data visualization, process design and optimization, and in developing analytics talent. Jose’s always seeking out opportunities to learn and teach new analytic tools and techniques to accelerate innovation.
Jose holds an MBA from Centenary University and a BS in Business Administration from the University at Buffalo.
Mindy Chen is the Director of Decision Science at Hudl. She leads a team of data engineers, analysts, scientists, and consumer insights researchers who combine qualitative and quantitative data into actionable insights to guide strategy. Throughout her career, Mindy has held a variety of roles that shape her approach to data. She was an engineer at Intel Corporation, a product manager at Cisco Systems, and a manager of consumer insights at PepsiCo. Drawing from these experiences, she brings a unique combination of engineering, product, and consumer research perspectives to help companies activate on data.
On any given day, you will find Mindy working hand in hand with managers on her team to create and cascade out the data strategy for the organization, partnering with leaders to help them take action on the data, insights, and predictions that her team delivers, activating on opportunities to commercialize data, working to scale her team and Hudl’s data ecosystem, and shaping the team for optimal composition and skillset. You will also find her using data to time the succession planting of vegetables in her organic garden, choose the most disease, heat, and shade-resistant turfgrass cultivars, and track healthcare needs for her 7 cats and 1 dog.
Mindy holds a BA in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and an MBA from Stanford University.
Jorge Vasquez is a senior leader of the Ecommerce and Technology Analytics team at Best Buy Canada. As a Practice Lead, he sets up standards and guides Analysts, BI Developers and Data Scientists. The team focuses on performing deep dive analyses using advanced analytics, providing strategic insights, and championing a data-informed culture within the company.
Jorge holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from Simon Fraser University, and has worked for several companies including Bank of Montreal and BlackBerry. He loves tackling advanced analytics projects while listening to AC/DC.
An expert in on and off site channel and website optimization, Melissa brings more than fifteen years of marketing and statistical analytics experience to Vanguard where she currently heads up Global Marketing Measurement.
Prior to joining Vanguard, Melissa ran digital demand generation and digital analytics for Comcast Business.
As the Senior Director of Analytics, Growth and Consumer Insights, Asif Rahman is responsible for all digital analytics, user acquisition and consumer insights efforts across Accuweather’s digital organization. Previously, he was Director, Digital Analytics and Insights at Univision Digital. Asif has spent 15+ years in digital roles within media, telecom, and eCommerce in both B2B and B2C industries; in a wide array of functions, ranging from digital product management, web, mobile and app analytics, project management, online and digital marketing, user acquisition, website, and app design and development.
At Accuweather, Asif, and his team are responsible for using data and insights to drive user acquisition efforts, product development, and marketing effectiveness and understanding audience behavior.
Fred Smith serves as both Team Lead for the Technology Team and Digital Metrics Lead in the Digital Media Branch in the Office of the Associate Director for Communication for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, GA.
His professional background spans various capacities throughout the governmental, private, nonprofit and academic sectors. He has led multiple student exchange groups to the Soviet Union and continued to work in student exchange programs in Russia and the New Independent States. Mr. Smith has taught Russian at the University of Kentucky and worked in the Kazakh-American Studies Center. After that, he spent three years with the Eurasia Foundation in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the countries in Central Asia where he developed and managed the offices for 5 countries and awarded over $3 million in grants for economic and democratic reform projects. His duties included overseeing program outreach and marketing as well as running national advertising campaigns in multiple countries.
Returning to the US in early 1997, Fred co-founded a small company that specialized in database-driven dynamic web applications, where he led development efforts in interactive web sites, mobile applications, and database projects. In 2005 he settled in Atlanta, Georgia and began working at the CDC doing web and application development, working with their new media efforts to find ways to effectively communicate health protection and promotion messages to the public through new channels, such as podcasts, content syndication, open data and APIs. He enjoys the on-going challenges of translating technical ideas and solutions to non-technical audiences while expanding the vision and reach of CDC’s messages through emerging technologies.
Fred is a certified Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) trainer for CDC and deployed to Sierra Leone in October 2014 for the Ebola in West Africa outbreak where he applied his CERC and digital communication knowledge into non-digital communications campaigns. From August to November 2016 he served as the Lead of the Joint Information Center for CDC’s response to the Zika Virus outbreak.
Fred hails from Corbin, KY and earned BA in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Kentucky, an MA in Russian Literature from the Ohio State University.
Jason is an Evangelist at Fivetran and works to serve the data community within Fivetran. He's a former DBA, report developer and code monkey; and now represents Fivetran as a community organizer and advocate. If you haven't seen him in person yet, you will likely soon at a data event (or webinar) near you..
Workshop Leaders
Chase Porter, Director of Data Operations, Evolytics
Chase is a forward-thinking, creative, analytical strategist and data storyteller. He is passionate about elevating the philosophy and practice of data-based decision making, testing and optimization for organizations of all shapes and sizes.
He has been analyzing website and marketing data since 2010 with experience across the full lifecycle of data analytics, including collection, aggregation, visualization, analysis and reporting. His primary specialty is integrating, visualizing and analyzing data from numerous platforms and marketing channels to assess multi-channel program effectiveness and optimize conversion performance.
At Evolytics, Chase serves as Director of Data Operations, supporting clients with measurement strategy, data integration, data visualization, and analysis. He leads a team of data engineers and data visualization analysts to build end-to-end data solutions and analytical tools. He also provides analytical thinking and strategic guidance supporting performance analysis and program optimization for clients such as St. Jude, Quickbooks, and Intuit.
