Hello everyone,
Some good news to start the year: Chris Gotwalt was just promoted to JMP Chief Data Scientist, as announced by John Sall in the email message below. This is good news for us because it means we should be able to get into meetings (once the world reopens) with higher-level executives at customers using this new title.
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JMP R&D:
I am pleased to announce that effective today, Chris Gotwalt is promoted to Senior Director - Advanced Analytics R&D.
He was also approved to have a subtitle, JMP Chief Data Scientist.
Chris has been at the forefront of the Statistical research and development and has led the Statistics group for many years now.
This is a good time to recognize how valuable Chris has been to our group.
In his own work, a focus area has been in mixed models. The early mixed model work included the ability to estimate negative components, and also the important Kenward Roger adjustment to reduce the bias in tests for small samples. Later he developed the routines for the complex random effects in the Mixed Model Pro feature. Mixed models numerics then were extended and improved to handle SEM and Functional Data Analysis numerics. Chris implemented a world-class sparse SVD that is at the heart of many of the multivariate routines in JMP, with special value for Text Analysis, where he pioneered a sparse SVD with centering and scaling. He implemented the Firth method in the Choice platform, and also figured out that REML is a special case of Firth bias correction. He developed the Neural platform with the important addition of a boosting feature for it that allowed the models grow stage-wise without the consequence of huge matrices. He was a collaborator and advisor for many other methods, such as in time series, reliability, quality, GenReg, SVM, SEM. He worked on several of the innovations in Design of Experiments, and was lead author on a paper on designs for nonlinear models. He built many of the foundation routines for numerical optimization and multithreading statistical calculations. He was the principal advisor on ADI for imputation. More recently, he has worked on weighted cross-validation, including a collaboration with Bill Meeker and another with Phil Ramsey.
As a leader, he recruited and trained several generations of statistics developers, advancing them on a career path that often started in testing and moved to code development. He enthusiastically embraced specialized C++ training for them. He guided the development of most of the statistical platforms in JMP. He supported his staff to seek patents.
He was also an active PhD advisor for a number of graduate students, including several who later became JMP developers. He served as chair of the Q&P section of ASA.
Chris has also been active in customer meetings, especially in Europe. He has long been a champion for JMP Pro, advocating it to win many customers, and advocating for many of the more advanced features in JMP to be in Pro. Chris has also been very active in presenting in conferences, and more recently in recording videos for our EA customers.
Congratulations, Chris, for your promotion, and thank you for a remarkable series of successes.
-John Sall"
