Our Team.
who we are
Our globally distributed team of experts combines unparalleled academic rigor with high-level industry expertise and the very latest in technical capabilities
our mission
We are delivering the world’s leading sports intelligence platforms and services.
There’s an absolute all-star team of people at Zelus. Everyone has a proven track record of talent, diligence and rigor. The group is the perfect mix of industry experience and academic neurotic perfectionism.
Our Values
Integrity
We’ve brought an incredible team together, each at the top of their fields. We check our egos at the door, embrace our best selves, and thrive as a united team because we learn from mistakes, celebrate successes, and uphold high standards through honest feedback.
Innovation
Innovation is a major part of what defines Zelus. We encourage creative engagement, questions, and partaking in a shared vision. Your contribution is crucial as we build the world’s best sports intelligence platform.
Inclusion
Zelus is dedicated to creating an inclusive environment where everyone is treated with respect. We value open communication, prioritizing a safe and collaborative workspace.
Roster Highlights
Christopher Pickard
After earning his B.S. and M.S. in Engineering from Stanford University, Chris joined the Sacramento Kings as a Senior Analyst; he built analysis and data systems to inform team strategy and roster decisions. At Stanford, Chris captained the Men's Swimming team, achieved Athletic & Academic All-American honors, and was an inaugural selection to Stanford Athletics' Home of Champions Hall of Fame.
Meghan Hall
Meghan has extensive experience in data analysis, visualization, and reporting, stemming from nearly a decade working in higher education data management. She also has a passion for data science education and welcoming others into the field of sports analytics. Outside of work, she enjoys baking, reading, yoga, and watching sports—namely hockey, baseball, cycling, and F1.
Douglas Fearing
Doug founded the Dodgers R&D department, grew it to a staff of 20 over four seasons, and reached the World Series in both 2017 and 2018. While a faculty member at Harvard and then UT Austin (2010-2015), he was the Senior Advisor to the Rays R&D team, and he received an MIT SSAC research award in 2013. Doug has a Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT.
Alexandra Griffin
With over a decade of progressive accounting experience, Alexandra began her career in public accounting before transitioning to the precious metals and mortgage industries, where she most recently served as an accounting manager. Outside of work, she is passionate about traveling and staying active, whether in the gym, hiking, biking, or exploring water sports.
Andrew Hopen
Andrew previously worked in the analytics departments of the New York Yankees and LA Dodgers. He completed his M.S. in Data Science at NYU in 2020. His other research interests lie in education, and before Zelus he studied university initiatives and student outcomes for NYU Institutional Research. Andrew loves dogs, theatre, and anything written by N.K. Jemisin.
Luke Borne
After leading analytics efforts at the Italian soccer club A.S. Roma, Luke took on the role of VP of Strategy & Analytics for the Sacramento Kings in 2017. He received MIT SSAC research awards in 2015 and 2019, and was on the faculty at Harvard College and Simon Fraser University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of British Columbia.
Inderpal Singh
Prior to joining Zelus, Inderpal founded Northshore Partners, a boutique strategy consulting firm. Previously, he spent time in executive roles at Bridgewater and HSBC. He also worked as a Strategy Consultant with McKinsey & Company and in Product at Microsoft. He holds an Honors B.Math in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.
Dan Cervone
The former Director of Quantitative Research with the LA Dodgers and Moore-Sloan Fellow at NYU’s Center for Data Science, Dan published foundational sports analytics work as part of the XY Research group during his Statistics PhD at Harvard. He has awards from the MIT SSAC in 2015 and 2019. Beyond sports, he’s a fan of traveling, coffee, Neapolitan pizza, and music ranging from classical to metal.
Andrew Galdi
Andy founded the Phillies R&D department, leading software development and data science for 6 seasons. His diverse career began in operations at the NY Mets, after which he moved to the NBA Commissioner's Office as a league operations statistical analyst, and then to Google as a quantitative analyst for YouTube. A 2008 graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, he earned his 2013 Statistics M.S. from Stanford.
Karim Kassam
Karim founded the research group at the Pittsburgh Steelers, leading data science for football operations. He’s also led data science efforts at the Minnesota Twins, Jacksonville Jaguars, Legendary Entertainment, and education startup Duolingo. Prior to his work as a data scientist, Karim was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 2010.
Stephanie Kovalchik
Stephanie led data science innovation for the Game Insight Group of Tennis Australia, building first-of-a-kind metrics and real-time applications with tracking data. An expert in tennis analytics and causal inference with 40+ published papers, she also developed novel statistical methods in her previous roles at the NCI and RAND Corporation. She blogs at on-the-t.com and is an amateur mixologist.
Bryan Yu
Bryan was previously in charge of data architecture and building statistical models for the public equities quantitative strategy at Santé Ventures / Capital. He received his M.S. in Statistics from Texas A&M, and his interests are Bayesian models and college football. Bryan loves a juicy hamburger, playing fetch with his dog, and watching movies.
Jacob Mortenson
Jacob recently graduated with his PhD in Statistics from Simon Fraser University, where he completed his thesis on statistical methods for tracking data in sports. Prior to joining Zelus, he helped build an analytics platform for the Sacramento Kings from the ground up. When not working, he enjoys cooking, rollerblading, and spending time with his three kids.
Kevin Meers
Kevin led the Cleveland Browns football research and strategy group, where he built an industry-leading analytics team focused on coaching, scouting, and sports science. Between the Browns and his prior work with the Dallas Cowboys, Kevin spent seven seasons in NFL front offices. He has also served in analytics for the City of Denver and Biden for President. He earned his BA and MBA at Harvard.
Matthew Hurbi
Most recently leading and restructuring the B2B team as Director of Finance & Admin at GCI (part of Liberty Broadband), Matthew began his career at KPMG as an Audit Associate working with middle market private and small cap publicly traded entities. A CPA with a BBA in Accounting, he is also an avid podcast enthusiast, a connoisseur of interactive digital entertainment, and aspiring to fitness.
Scott Powers
Scott earned a PhD in statistics at Stanford University in 2017. From there, he worked five seasons in baseball research & development for the Los Angeles Dodgers and one season as an assistant general manager for the Houston Astros. Scott will join the faculty of Rice University in July 2023 as an assistant professor of sport analytics.
Alexander Franks
Alex is currently and Associate Professor of Statistics and Applied Probability at the university of Santa Barbara. He has consulted with a number of professional basketball teams and received an MIT SSAC research award in 2015 while a student at Harvard University. His research interests include causal inference, missing data and measurement error, Bayesian statistics and sports.
Daniel Lee
Daniel Lee co-created Stan, the open-source statistical modeling language. He has developed models for professional sports teams and for topics including vote share for US elections, clinical trials for cancer and rare diseases, retail price sensitivity and music streams, and data fusion for the US Navy. He holds a B.S. from MIT and an M.A.S. from Cambridge, and lives in NYC with his wife and son.
Matthew Van Bommel
Matt spent three seasons working with the Sacramento Kings and has published research examining biases and inconsistencies of basketball scorekeepers. He holds an MSc in Statistics from Simon Fraser University and a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics from Acadia University. Matt enjoys hypothetical questions and dabbling in many hobbies, currently including cycling, juggling, and board games.
Bryce Rogan
Bryce worked for three years in the Los Angeles Angels analytics department after earning a BA in mathematics from Pomona College. At Pomona, he also published research utilizing a variety of neural networks, and played left field for the baseball team. Outside work, Bryce can be found riding his bike, watching a bike race, baking bread, or soothing his anxious Chihuahua, Rhubarb.
Amol Desai
Amol is an experienced Data Science leader in the Tech industry. He has been a freelance consultant at Cricviz, conducts independent research in Cricket analytics, and collaborates with other technical and non-technical content creators and thinkers. Amol is passionate about leveraging his experience and expertise to serve Cricket. Amol has a Master's degree in Engineering from Georgia Tech.
Esteban Navarro Garaiz
A Data Scientist shifting his focus to product, Esteban spent the two years prior to Zelus as a Quantitative Analyst at the Dodgers, where he won a World Series in 2020. Born and raised in Mexico City, he holds a Data Science MS from New York University (where he was a DeepMind fellow and Fulbright scholar) and a BS in Mathematics from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).
Hannah Gaudet
After graduating with a BS in math from MIT, Hannah spent 2.5 years with the Philadelphia Phillies, where they led the team's ML engineering work. Too indecisive to stick to just one sport, they diversified their repertoire during their time with the Boston Bruins and Second Spectrum. When not at work, Hannah is cooking, muttering about education policy, or trying to lift heavy(ish) objects.
Javier Fernandez
Javier led FC Barcelona's sports analytics department for five years, working closely with top-level coaches. His PhD and MSc theses are devoted to modeling spatiotemporal dynamics in soccer for providing interpretable insights. Javier is a usual contributor to the analytics community, including awards at the MIT SSAC and being a founding member of the Friends of Tracking initiative.
Marco Viero
As an astrophysicist at Caltech and Stanford, Marco popularized the use of statistical approaches to study intensity fluctuations from galaxies in the early universe. Line-intensity mapping has since motivated many dedicated projects, including the SPHEREx space telescope, for which Marco subsequently worked. He has also been a data scientist at Wahoo Fitness, and frame designer at Parlee Cycles.
Ivana Šerić
Ivana spent four seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers, providing coaches with data-driven insight, and one season with Overtime Elite, establishing data and sports tech processes. She represented her native Croatia in youth basketball competitions and later was a four-year starter at NJIT, where she earned her BS and PhD in Applied Math. In her spare time, Ivana enjoys bicycling and long hikes.
Nicholas Kapur
Nick worked as a senior member of the Dodgers Analytics department for 4 seasons, winning the World Series in 2020. Prior to that, he spent 1 season with the New York Yankees and several years working with NC State University athletics while attending as an undergraduate and graduate student. He has presented his work on Reinforcement Learning in the Madden video game at several conferences.
Natan Weinberger
Natan was the first software engineer in the Phillies R&D department. He spent five years there, leading development of the data platform and backend. Outside of work, Natan likes going to concerts, building with microcontrollers and hardware, and hitting bombs in beer league softball.
Jacob Coleman
After earning a PhD in Statistics from Duke in 2019, Jake worked for the Dodgers for four years as a Senior Quantitative Analyst. His research interests lie in spatial modeling as well as forecasting through Dynamic Linear Models. Jake spends the majority of his free time training for Ultimate Frisbee, and also enjoys playing video games and Magic: The Gathering.
Philip Baker
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, Phil spent four years with the Cleveland Guardians where he built application software and platform tooling before becoming the Assistant Director of Baseball Systems. Alongside Cory Jez, Phil built TourIQ to support PGA Tour golfers prior to joining Zelus. Phil loves to travel with friends, spend time with family, and play golf and basketball.
Matthew Reyers
While at Simon Fraser U., Matthew and his team won the NFL Big Data Bowl in 2019 and gained honourable mention in 2020. The winner of the Canadian Operational Research Society’s Student Paper Contest and a graduate Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Scholarship holder, he enjoys spending his free time running hackathons and running kilometres.
Tyrel Stokes
Tyrel is a PhD student in Statistics at McGill University, where he is interested in causal inference, Bayesian methods, and applications in medicine, the social sciences, and sport. Before statistics, Tyrel was an Experimental/Behavioural Economist. These days he enjoys bouldering, cycling, singing, taking really long walks, and dreaming about playing team sports again one day.
Adrià Arbués-Sangüesa
Adrià is an audiovisual engineer who newly obtained his PhD, which covered tracking-related topics such as player orientation estimation and its effect on passes. Although his research is mainly soccer-driven, Adrià is a basketball geek, with coaching experience in youth F.C. Barcelona teams and teaching analytics in national coaching courses. In his limited free time, he organizes research fairs.
Cecil Ash
Cecil was the analytics engineer of an award-winning business intelligence product from its inception to market entry and expansion. Prior to that, he earned his BASc and MASc in Industrial Engineering from Dalhousie University with research publications in supply chain optimization during pandemics. In his free time, Cecil enjoys sword fighting (fencing), trail running, and baking sourdough.
Cory Jez
Before founding TourIQ Golf which merged with Zelus in October 2023, Cory was the previous head of analytics for the Utah Jazz and Austin FC. Cory holds an M.S. in Data Science from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Economics from Virginia Tech. Cory now leads Zelus' efforts in Golf, helping a number of PGA Tour professionals use advanced analytics to improve their on-course performance.
Robert Sims
Before joining Zelus, Robert worked in the analytics department of the Los Angeles Chargers. He received his PhD in Physics from Brown University and an MSc from Dartmouth College, where his research was focused on theoretical particle physics and cosmology. He was also a finalist in the open division of the 2022 Big Data Bowl.
B. Jedlovec
Ben led product, data science, and data quality for MLB's Statcast team. Prior, he led Sports Info Solutions’ multi-sport expansion across product, R&D, and technology. He also co-authored two volumes of The Fielding Bible and taught Sabermetrics 101 at Lehigh University. A Rice grad, he enjoys climate tech, escape rooms, and coaching his three daughters' sports.
M Singh
R. Moreau
R. Horansky
C. Peter
M. Kwiatkowski
Marek has over a decade of experience in soccer data science, having consulted for Brentford FC, Olympique de Marseille, StatsBomb and other sport entities since 2013. His academic research, most recently at the University of Basel in Switzerland, spans theoretical ecology, evolutionary dynamics, epidemiology and global health. Marek holds a PhD in Informatics from The University of Edinburgh.
T. Jurica
Are you passionate about Sports?
Does solving complex problems excite you?
Do you want to join our story?
Take a look at our current openings or, if we are not currently hiring, please leave us an application on an off-cycle job posting — we review these first when we open a new role.