Math alum Bill Fahrbach rides a rapid wave of success as a CFO in the technology world

A few years after Bill Fahrbach (B.S. ’02, mathematics; B.A. ’02, economics) graduated from the University of Maryland, he had a tough decision to make: should he stay on a path toward a career in business or give it all up to become a professional musician.

“It was either music school to be a jazz musician or business school,” he recalled. “I loved music and played guitar in bands throughout college and a musical career was definitely tempting. All my bandmates had already moved out to LA and became musicians, I was the only holdout.”

Though music would always be a part of his life, Fahrbach decided business was a better career choice.

“I realized that although I love music, I would never be happy without the challenge of the business world,” he said. “You can’t just chase what feels good at the moment, you have to chase what’s going to continue to fulfill you.”

Fahrbach’s decision to pursue business paid off. Honored with numerous awards, he has risen to rockstar status in the technology world for his success as a financial leader and advisor, guiding big and small tech businesses through exponential growth, acquisitions and highly profitable selloffs for over 10 years.

In his current role as chief financial officer at Facet Wealth, Fahrbach restructured and rebuilt the finance team, launched a data and analytics program, and raised more than $150 million in just 10 months, with more growth still to come, all setting the stage for a future IPO. It’s a high-stakes, high-return career that fits perfectly with the kind of challenges Fahrbach loves most as well as his passion for mathematics and problem-solving.

“I’m in an executive role that requires me to consider the interests and personalities of various stakeholders, internal and external, but at the heart of it I’m a corporate problem-solver, it’s what I do as a CFO of technology businesses,” Fahrbach explained. “I love solving problems. In my college math classes that was really appealing to me—every question was, ‘Here’s an issue, solve for the problem.’ It’s very exact, it’s very fact-based and I just enjoy going through that logic chain and getting to an answer.”

Starting early with math

 For Fahrbach, it all started with mathematics. Growing up in Long Island, New York, he gravitated toward math early on.

 “I was always good with numbers and logic,” he said. “I excelled at a young age and it kind of came naturally to me.”

 When Fahrbach entered the University of Maryland, he initially leaned into electrical engineering and economics, seeing law school and a career as an intellectual property attorney in his future. But as time went on, he realized he was more interested in problem-solving than circuit theory. And just before his junior year, an internship at Morgan Stanley convinced him he’d found his niche.

 “It kind of blends all the things I was interested in. It’s business, it’s sales, but it’s also detail orientation, analytics and all those things that I really enjoyed,” Fahrbach noted. “When I took the internship and loved it, I said to myself, ‘This is something I can see being really excited about.’”

 Realizing that math and economics would put him on a solid track toward investment banking, Fahrbach changed his major to math and soaked up as much as he could before graduating in 2002.

 “I had a lot of great mathematics professors at Maryland,” he recalled. “They had a terrific program and they taught me so much.”

From UMD to Wall Street

From UMD, Fahrbach went on to Wall Street and his first job at Standard and Poor’s.

“I worked in leverage lending, analyzing the debt markets,” he said. “It was great training on how the finance world and the capital-raised world work and it helped me understand business and run analytics in a way that was relevant.”

Fahrbach joined a Credit Suisse spinoff firm in 2005, working as an investment analyst until 2007 when he moved to Merrill Lynch. For Fahrbach, it marked a fork in the professional road.

“I thought, do I want to be a lifetime institutional finance person, or do I want to take the skills that I’ve acquired and help individual businesses directly,” he recalled. “I learned that what I really enjoyed was the challenge, the problem-solving, and working with people to optimize outcomes. When I sat down with executives in fast-growing businesses and saw them grapple with key strategic business decisions, it was just really exciting.”

By 2007, the appeal of an advisory role in business was so strong, Fahrbach put his career on hold to earn his MBA. The timing was pivotal.

“I was in business school during the financial crisis of 2008 to 2009 and the world changed in those years,” he explained. “You had a lot of great people pursuing nontraditional, more entrepreneurial paths, whether it was starting a business and growing it and raising venture capital or entering private equity-backed businesses, which is what I do now.”

Earning an MBA launched Fahrbach into a new role working closely with tech businesses, from Iris Wireless, where he managed mergers and acquisitions, to Oragenics, a health technology company where he advised executives on major strategic decisions.

“In 2010, I was brought in to Oragenics to work with the Board and CEO to figure out how to best monetize their assets,” Fahrbach said. “We launched their consumer products division from the ground floor, then spun it out, sold it and recapitalized the business, which we later partnered.”

“In many cases in the past, my goal has been to sell myself out of a job”

In 2013, Fahrbach landed his first CFO position at Mobile Commons, a software company where he learned volumes about the inner workings of running a deal process. Hired to position the business for sale in 18 to 24 months, Fahrbach had it sold in just seven months. 

He moved on to WorkWave and achieved another career milestone.

“We more than quadrupled the size of the business in four years,” Fahrbach recalled. “We acquired five businesses, then sold the company, and achieved a great outcome for our investors. It really launched my credibility in the private equity world.”

As he moved on to another CFO role at ComplySci, then another at CultureIQ, each opportunity set the stage for the next.

“You see there’s a pattern to this right? When I sell off to a strategic party, that’s typically my cue,” he explained. “My goal is to sell myself out of a job and go on to the next one.”

When Fahrbach joined Facet Wealth in 2021, it was the right opportunity at the right time.

“It’s been a very intense 10 years, it takes a lot out of you,” he explained. “So the idea of having a four to five-year trajectory to grow and to launch an IPO was exciting to me and a compelling reason for me to accept the challenge.  I love doing deals, but I love operating just as much.”

Fahrbach credits the strong foundation in mathematics he built at UMD and his years of financial and business experience with much of his success. But he admits he couldn’t do this work if he wasn’t passionate about it.

“The world I’m in is not for the faint of heart, it can be brutal,” he admitted. “You cannot slip up and very often there’s a lot of people’s money on the line and they trust you to get a great outcome for them. There’s no way that I’d be able to do this if I didn’t love it.”

After nearly a decade as a CFO, Fahrbach is still hooked on the challenges that drew him to business and finance from the beginning. And he’s still learning every step of the way.

“I thought I was pretty proficient years ago and now I look back and think, I could have been better,” Fahrbach reflected. “So it’s probably reasonable to think that 10 years from now I’ll say the same thing about where I am today. As long as I’m still being challenged and I’m getting better at what I do, I imagine I’ll be fulfilled.”

Written by Leslie Miller

How alum Thomas Geisler transitioned from the U.S. Army to the University of Maryland and a career as a software engineer

In 2013, when many of his friends from the Baltimore area were finishing college or starting their careers, Thomas Geisler found himself in a very different place: a combat zone. In Laghman Province, Afghanistan, even the weather was like nothing Geisler had ever experienced—and not in a good way.

“I was in such a dusty place in Afghanistan that when it rained the raindrops would collect dirt on the way down,” Geisler recalled. “I don’t know how many people can say that they’ve gotten caught in a mud rainstorm, but I have, and it’s not pleasant.”

Geisler (B.S. ’21, mathematics; B.S. ’21, computer science) served seven years as an intelligence analyst and Arabic translator in the U.S. Army, with assignments in the U.S., Afghanistan and Germany. Soon after he left the military, he enrolled at the University of Maryland, where he discovered a passion for mathematics and later, computer science.

Thanks to his UMD coursework and internships and his boundless interest in math, problem-solving and more, Geisler forged a career path that meshed his love for science with the intelligence experience he gained in the Army. Now he’s taking his skills to the next level as a software engineer at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), a position he calls “ideal.”

“I love it. To be honest, I couldn’t ask for anything more,” Geisler said. “Because it has a lot of government contracting, it’s very rewarding and I feel like it’s a career where every day I feel like I make an impact.”

Always reading, relentlessly curious

Geisler grew up in south Baltimore, Maryland. A quiet, introverted kid, he was always reading and relentlessly curious.

“I remember my parents getting frustrated with me taking things apart and putting them back together,” Geisler recalled. “I think I messed with a vacuum cleaner once that never quite got fixed. I was always interested in everything, always tinkering around.”

After high school, Geisler enrolled at Ohio State University, the first in his family to go to college. But once he got there, he had trouble finding his way.

“I was just completely lost, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Geisler recalled. “I must have changed majors four or five times, I was in business, and then economics and then I wanted to do languages, then I wanted to do social sciences. And believe it or not, the one thing that I never got into was hard science. The interest was there but I never really thought about doing it.”

After two frustrating years, Geisler decided it was time to change course. He started thinking seriously about joining the military.

“It seemed like an opportunity to step back and put a pause on big things like school and finding a career and reset my life,” he explained. “I was 13 when 9/11 happened and then in my teenage years, you couldn’t turn on the news without hearing about Iraq or Afghanistan. I had friends that enlisted, and it just seemed like something I could do beyond subtle patriotism.”

In 2009, Geisler came home from Ohio State for winter break and never went back.

“I was staying with my parents for Christmas,” he recalled. “And this may sound sort of fantastical, but I remember that it was the first thing that I told my parents Christmas morning. I said, ‘Hey, I’m joining the Army.’ There were two wars going on at the time.”

Deployed to Afghanistan

After basic training in Missouri, the Army sent Geisler to language school in California to learn Arabic, then on to Louisiana to build his analytical skills before he deployed to Afghanistan in 2013.

“It was scary, to be frank, but the anticipation of going there was harder to deal with than actually being there,” he said. “You don’t ever know what’s going to happen.”

In Afghanistan, Geisler tracked insurgent networks to identify significant threats to U.S. personnel.

“I was working the military intelligence mission while I was in Afghanistan,” Geisler explained.
“I was focusing a lot on IED networks, analyzing networks of people that were building and implanting and detonating explosive devices.”

In 2014, after nearly a year in Afghanistan, Geisler came back to the U.S. and then deployed to Germany as a signals intelligence analyst, using his Arabic language skills extensively and identifying threats to U.S. embassies, consulates and others.

Geisler completed his military service in 2017, and headed back home to Maryland to start a new chapter in his life. He applied to UMD, thinking he might major in engineering. But a few prerequisite courses later, everything changed.

“I started doing all the math classes and it just hit me—I realized this was the direction I wanted to go in,” Geisler recalled. “I walked over to the mathematics building and declared a math major.”

Geisler remembers reading book after book on the history of mathematics and the fundamentals of mathematical proof and spending hours picking professors’ brains about their research. Along the way, he developed a deep appreciation for the mechanics and the certainty of problem-solving.

“What I love about mathematics is that many problems can be solved in a variety of different ways,” he explained. “How someone solves a particular problem says a lot about their strengths and weaknesses, and no matter how a problem is solved, mathematics as an extension of formal logic prescribes a method of being absolutely certain that a solution is correct.”

While Geisler advanced his knowledge of math and later added a computer science major, he also volunteered with veterans groups on campus, grateful for the support they had given him.

“Coming back to school as a 27-year-old, I didn’t think I would fit in, but the veteran community at Maryland was awesome, they were absolutely instrumental in helping me acclimate,” Geisler said. “My time at UMD was very much the defining characteristic of this big transition from being in the Army to having a civilian career.”

As time went on, Geisler began to see how the analytical skills he learned in the Army could mesh with his new skill set in mathematical calculations and software development, and he thought APL might be a place where he could apply both. Two summer internships convinced him he was right.

“In my first internship at APL, I was doing a lot of background research for new contracts, then I got another internship the summer of ’21 and I was writing software for projects that were very important to the U.S. intelligence community,” Geisler explained. “In a way, it really mirrored everything I was doing when I was in the Army.”

By the time Geisler graduated in December 2021, he accepted a full-time opportunity as a software engineer at APL. Now he’s developing software for microcontroller and RF geolocation systems, applying the skills he learned at UMD every day.

“Calculus and number theory are essential to much of the work I do, and I use that and many things I learned at UMD on a daily basis,” Geisler said. “Mathematics isn't just about solving esoteric problems; it offers a method of understanding problems and assuring that a solution is grounded in facts and appropriate logical conclusion. At work I often find myself stopping to ask whether I've drawn a logical conclusion or if I've just been sloppy.”

Geisler has come a long way from that dusty combat zone in Afghanistan. Settled down with his wife in Sykesville, Maryland, he looks ahead to the challenges at APL and hopes to go to graduate school someday. And although he may not have taken the traditional path to get here, he’s exactly where he wants to be.

“Despite the fact that I never really had a clear plan starting out and I didn’t necessarily do things with a clear goal in mind, I couldn’t be happier with how it’s all worked out,” Geisler reflected. “I’m proud of my military service, I’m proud to have gone to UMD, I’m just really happy.”

Written by Leslie Miller

Viray (B.S. ’05) is a professor at the University of Washington.

Bianca Viray, a professor at the University of Washington (UMD 2005), has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year. The fellowship gives exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion is the excellence of the candidate's research.

An arithmetic geometer, Viray researches rational points on varieties, particularly how a variety’s geometric properties influence failures of the local-to-global principle. “My research projects are broadly motivated by wanting to understand arithmetic properties of a variety as we extend the base field, and what the sets of points look like over extensions,” she said.

Recently, Viray has studied degree d points, considering solubility over unions of extensions of bounded or prescribed degree. During her fellowship year, she will take part in a program on Diophantine geometry at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Viray will also host collaborators including Brendan Creutz of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand).

“I am honored to be awarded this prestigious fellowship in recognition of my research and thankful for my many wonderful mentors, collaborators, and colleagues who have supported me through my career,” she said.

Viray earned her PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley. She was at Brown University from 2010 until 2014 as a Tamarkin Assistant Professor and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2014. In the 2021–2022 academic year, she is a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An active organizer in the mathematics community, Viray is a co-founder of the paraDIGMS (Diversity in Graduate Mathematical Sciences) initiative and a member of the board of directors of Girls’ Angle. She is also a member at large of the AMS Council and a Fellow of the AMS. Read a Simons Foundation profile of Viray, who was named a 2020 Simons Fellow in Mathematics.

About the Fellowship

The AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars, established in 2017 with a gift from Joan and Joseph Birman, seeks to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years. The primary selection criterion for the Birman Fellowship is the excellence of the candidate's research. See past recipients and read about their experiences with the fellowship (PDF).

Contact: AMS Communications.

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The American Mathematical Society is dedicated to advancing research and connecting the diverse global mathematical community through our publications, meetings and conferences, MathSciNet, professional services, advocacy, and awareness programs.

This article was copied from AMS News: https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=6982

Seniors Steven Jin and Naveen Raman from the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS) have been awarded 2022 Winston Churchill Scholarships, which offers them full funding to pursue a one-year master’s degree at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. The scholarship, valued at around $60,000, covers all educational fees and provides living and travel allowances.

“Steven and Naveen have both demonstrated a sustained commitment to research, leadership and service,” said CMNS Dean Amitabh Varshney. “I join their mentors and the entire Terp community in congratulating them on being named Churchill Scholars. We couldn't be more proud of them!”

Nationally, 16 students in the sciences, engineering or mathematics received Churchill Scholarships this year out of 110 nominations from 73 participating institutions. Seven UMD students have been nominated in the past five years—and all of them have been named Churchill Scholars. 

“Lighting doesn’t usually strike twice in a competition as fierce as the Churchill, but Steven and Naveen are forces of nature and this extraordinary twin success is testament to their hard work, talent and ambition,” said Richard Bell, a UMD professor of history who serves as the university’s faculty advisor for United Kingdom fellowships. 

Steven Jin

Jin, a mathematics major, is interested in arithmetic algebraic geometry (where number theory and geometry come together) and geometric representation theory (which seeks to study symmetry by using techniques from geometry). He has published two papers, had a third paper recently accepted, and given 11 oral presentations at research conferences and 25 expository talks.

Steven Jin. Photo courtesy of same.

The Churchill Scholarship will allow Jin to pursue his Master of Advanced Study degree (also known as Part III of the Mathematical Tripos) at the University of Cambridge. After his time there, Jin plans to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.

“I am interested in a modern research program called the Langlands Program, which describes a broad web of research threads that aim to unite certain concepts across fields like number theory, algebraic geometry and even Fourier analysis,” Jin said. “I have been introduced to many of these research threads via graduate courses, reading courses and working seminars, and I am learning to navigate the associated literature through my honors thesis work.”

At UMD, he has worked with Mathematics Professor Lawrence Washington on elliptic curve analogues of classical lower bounds on the least primitive root of a prime. This work resolves a variation of a well-studied question about the integers, recast to the modern context of arithmetic algebraic geometry. With his departmental honors thesis advisor, Mathematics Professor Thomas Haines, Jin is working to develop a theory of Rapoport-Zink local models for split reductive groups over arbitrary function fields. If successful, this work will grant researchers in the field certain representation-theoretic machinery that was previously restricted only to special cases.

“Steven Jin is an extremely energetic, passionate and devoted student of mathematics,” Haines said. “He is unusually broadly informed for an undergraduate student and is currently functioning like a mid-career graduate student.”

Jin has also participated in research experiences for undergraduates (REU) programs for the last three summers. At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2019, he used techniques from analytic number theory and harmonic analysis to produce new bounds for numerous classes of exponential sums. In 2020, at Kent State University, Jin used techniques from noncommutative ring theory and combinatorics to unify and generalize pre-existing results on the Behrens radical properties of noncommutative rings. He spent this past summer at the University of Virginia using techniques from analytic and algebraic number theory to exhibit the first completely explicit and unconditional effective bounds in the error term for the Sato-Tate conjecture. 

Jin has received the UMD Department of Mathematics’ Strauss Scholarship, Dan Shanks Award in computational number theory, Higginbotham Award and several travel grants to speak at research conferences. He was also awarded a Maryland Summer Scholars grant. 

Outside the classroom, he speaks to students in high school math clubs in Howard County, Maryland, where he grew up and attended Mount Hebron High School. He has also tutored dozens of middle and high school students as they prepared for the SAT, ACT and AP exams, and he trained students for the American Math Competition. He also helped inmates in Howard County prepare for the mathematics GED test. 

As a residence hall president, assistant vice president of academic affairs for the SGA, and SGA representative to the Teaching and Learning Transformation Center advisory committee, Jin spearheaded a number of projects, such as expanding study spaces across campus, promoting textbook affordability and increasing internship-related travel support.

Naveen Raman

Raman, a computer science and mathematics double major, began working with UMD computer science faculty members in 2018. Since then, he has authored or co-authored seven conference papers on topics at the intersection of computer science, economics and social good.

Naveen Raman. Photo courtesy of same.

The Churchill Scholarship will allow Raman to work with Jon Crowcroft, the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the University of Cambridge Computer Lab, on his M.Phil. in computer science. He plans to focus on the fairness of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms in critical fields such as criminal justice, job markets and health care. After his time in Cambridge, Raman plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science.

“For graduate school, I plan to study how AI and ML systems can work for social good through applications to health care and social networks,” Raman said. “AI and ML have the potential to revolutionize health care through improvements in clinical prognosis, but predicting patient outcomes and diseases is especially challenging for patients from marginalized communities due to data sparsity and bias. I plan to combat these problems by developing robust learning algorithms that work in the presence of data perturbations and minimize error rates.”

Raman began using intelligent computing to improve the utility and fairness of human systems with Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science Aravind Srinivasan and former Computer Science Assistant Professor Max Leiserson. He worked with them to develop algorithms to identify cancer mutation signatures before moving on to working with Computer Science Assistant Professor John Dickerson to develop policies that balance fairness and profit in ride-pooling systems.

He also works with Computer Science Associate Professor Jordan Boyd-Graber to improve question answering systems by leveraging data from trivia competitions. Raman’s focus is on advancing so-called named entity linking algorithms, which connect names found in a question to larger repositories of data about them like Wikipedia. These advances will ultimately help question answering systems perform better on a diverse set of questions.

In summer 2019, Raman worked to detect rudeness, toxicity and burnout in open-source communities as a participant in Carnegie Mellon University’s Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering program. Two summers ago, he worked at Facebook to develop a user interface for debugging machine learning models and learned about important societal issues that machine learning can help solve, such as hate speech detection. Last summer, he worked at MIT Lincoln Labs to improve human-artificial intelligence collaboration. This semester, he is working at the World Resources Institute as part of the Electric School Bus Initiative.

“Naveen is working at the forefront of a broad portfolio of fields—software engineering with his CMU colleagues, natural language processing with Jordan Boyd-Graber here at UMD, computer vision with his MIT Lincoln Labs colleagues, and 'EconCS' meets fairness in AI with me,” Dickerson said. “He is at the beginning of what will, without a doubt, be a storied and impactful career.”

Raman, who attended Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland, is a member of the Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students in the Honors College and the Global Fellows program. He is also a Goldwater Scholar, President’s Scholar, Philip Merrill Presidential Scholar and a Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher finalist. He has been awarded the Brendan Iribe Endowed Scholarship, Capital One Bank Dean’s Scholarship in Computer Science and Corporate Partners in Computing Scholarship.

An active competitor, Raman’s team won the National Academy Quiz Tournaments’ Division 2 Intercollegiate Championship Tournament during his freshman year. In 2020, he and two classmates received an honorable mention award in the 72-hour Mathematical Contest in Modeling for their project that analyzed the effect that rising global temperatures have on herring and mackerel fishing along the Scottish coast. He also received an outstanding award in the 2020 SIMIODE Challenge Using Differential Equations Modeling for his team’s work on modeling interactions in refugee camps.

He has been a teaching assistant for a programming languages class and the lead student instructor for a class on algorithms for coding interviews. 

Off campus, Raman teaches math skills to underprivileged elementary school students in the Maryland Mentor Program and previously volunteered at the College Park Academy charter school helping students improve their math skills.

UMD Alum Katherine Calvin is on a mission at NASA

In January 2022, Katherine Calvin (B.S. ’03, mathematics; B.S. ’03, computer science) was named NASA chief scientist and senior climate advisor, tasked with advancing NASA’s entire science portfolio, and climate science in particular, in the years to come. Before taking on this new role at NASA, Calvin spent 14 years as an Earth scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute, a partnership between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the University of Maryland, exploring and analyzing the relationships between human and Earth systems in the context of global climate change. During her time there, she also worked on the Department of Energy’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model, which is used to analyze the past, present and future state of the Earth system. Calvin has co-authored more than 100 publications.  

In a recent interview, Calvin shared her favorite memories from her days at UMD and her thoughts on her new role at NASA and the challenges ahead. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell us about your new position at NASA as chief scientist and senior climate advisor—how did it come about and what are your responsibilities?

NASA has had a chief scientist position for many years and created the position of senior climate advisor in early 2021. The agency combined those two roles and I started serving in this position in January of 2022. NASA’s climate research spans the agency and includes observations, models, applied science and technology development. As senior climate advisor, my job is to help connect climate research within NASA and communicate that research externally to other agencies, international partners, and the public. As chief scientist, my job is to communicate and advance NASA science more broadly.

What are the biggest challenges you face in this position?

NASA has a lot of exciting science missions. I am fortunate that I get to talk about these every day, but it is really the work of a lot of fantastic scientists. I want to make sure people recognize the scientists behind the research in addition to the science itself. 

Why is it so important for NASA to go all in on addressing climate change now?

We know from observations made on and above the Earth’s surface that the planet’s climate is changing. 2021 was tied for the 6th warmest year on record. And collectively, the past eight years have been the warmest since modern record keeping began. Along with increases in temperature, we’re experiencing other changes in the Earth system, including declines in Arctic sea ice, increases in sea level, more heavy precipitation events, more heatwaves and more wildfires. We know from science that many of those impacts will increase with more warming. NASA’s Earth observations, models and applied science tools can help us better understand and respond to climate change.

Do you have personal goals or specific ways you’d like to make your mark in this role? 

I want to make sure people know NASA science and NASA scientists. People often know about the planetary science and astrophysics at NASA. NASA is also a world leader in climate and Earth science. I want to amplify all that we do across the entire science portfolio. The people doing the research and developing the technologies are what make NASA so great—and I want to make sure people know about them, too. 

How important is it to you to be on the cutting edge of addressing climate change?

We know from research done at NASA and elsewhere around the world that the climate is changing, and those changes have impacts on our daily lives. It is important to me that people have the information they need to make informed decisions. That is one of the things that really excites me about being at NASA—NASA has experience explaining complex science and is committed to open science, both of which are critical to informing decisions. 

How excited are you to be in this place at this time?

I have always admired NASA—its inspirational missions and amazing science. NASA shows us what happens when you bring together a team of really smart people to explore the universe and solve problems. I’m excited to be a part of that. And we have a lot of exciting missions coming up in 2022. We’re launching several Earth science missions that will help us better understand tropical cyclones, mineral dust, rivers and oceans. We’re expecting the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope this summer, which will let us look back 13.5 billion years to see galaxies formed in the early universe. And we’re launching Artemis I—the first in a series of missions to explore the moon in preparation for missions to Mars.

How have your previous positions as a scientist prepared you for this opportunity?

My research has focused on understanding how the Earth and human systems might change in the future, including developing scenarios of future climate and quantifying the effects of climate change. It spanned the range of climate science, climate impacts and mitigation. This type of research required me to learn to work across disciplines and talk to scientists with very different backgrounds than I have. I worked with physicists, hydrologists, economists, ecologists, engineers and many others. That experience helped prepare me for my role as chief scientist, where I get to interact with people across NASA’s science portfolio, including astrophysicists, planetary scientists, astrobiologists and many more.

Your educational background is in mathematics and computer science—how do you apply that expertise to the work you’re doing at NASA?

The research I was doing involved developing and using mathematical models to understand human and Earth systems. This work used both my math and computer science degrees. I helped implement mathematical equations describing energy, water, land and climate in computer code. Research at NASA also uses math and computer science—from developing models to processing satellite data. Math and computer science serve as common languages among the sciences. By writing down a problem in a mathematical equation or a block of computer code, other scientists can understand it.

You earned your bachelor’s degrees at the University of Maryland—how pivotal were those years in shaping your path for the future?

The math and computer science classes I took at UMD were the foundation for the research I have done since. I also worked part time for the Department of Energy while at UMD, where I worked on energy modeling. That was my first introduction to mathematical modeling, and it led me to pursue graduate school in management science and engineering. 

Tell me about your time at Maryland—what are your favorite memories?

My favorite memories from UMD were related to sports and people. I went to almost every home game for both football and basketball while at Maryland. And I had a great group of friends that I met in the dorms or in classes. Those games and people made a big school feel like a community to me. I’m still friends with the people I met at Maryland.

What was the most important thing you learned in your years at UMD?

I was part of the Gemstone program while I was at UMD. In that program, we formed interdisciplinary teams to research real-world problems. It was my first real exposure to interdisciplinary work. The people on my team had a variety of majors and learning to communicate and work with them was one of the most important things I learned at UMD.

How did your academic experiences before college steer you toward mathematics and computer science and UMD?

I am originally from Maryland. In high school, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be when I grew up or even what the options were. I knew I liked math, so I declared it as a major. I had taken one computer science class in high school but didn’t add it as a second major until I got to UMD. 

I started researching climate change in grad school. I have always spent a lot of time outdoors hiking, camping, biking and boating. By spending a lot of time outside, I developed a deep appreciation for nature and an awareness of weather. Climate change was an opportunity for me to bring together my technical skills with something that mattered to me.

Is there anything that people might be surprised to learn about you?

I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. It was a really great experience to spend several days hiking there. The views were spectacular, particularly once we got above the clouds. And we got to walk through and see several different ecosystems along the way.

Do you have a mission in your life or a particular way you want to make a difference?

It is important to me that people have the information and resources they need to make informed decisions. We know the planet’s climate is changing and this has impacts on our daily lives. But we are at a point where we need to go beyond collecting data and move towards making sure it can be easily used. One of the big things we’re working on at NASA is data accessibility. We want to make sure people can take our data and use it when they are making decisions, whether those are about climate mitigation, adaptation or planning. That to me is important.

Looking back at your career so far, what are your thoughts about all you’ve accomplished up to this point? 

At every step in my career, I’ve focused on learning all that I could and doing the best that I could. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I am very happy with where I am now. I have a fascinating job, where I get to work with a lot of amazing people. I learn new things every day and get to be a part of a team that is exploring the universe.

UMD students work across disciplines and majors on four-year research project

How can we remove bias from artificial intelligence (AI) systems designed for everything from talent acquisition to online shopping to surveillance systems? 

Ten University of Maryland undergraduates came together to answer this question for their Gemstone honors research project. One of those students was Philip Mathew, a junior mathematics and computer science double major.

“I knew I wanted to focus on AI bias because of research I’d done on diabetic retinopathy at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab,” Mathew said. “When I was a freshman intern, I learned that with diabetic retinopathy, your melanin count does play a difference in how your retinal scans look—and we saw that underrepresentation of people of color in the training data led to bias against accurate diagnoses for those people groups.”

Historical human bias—against people of color, women and other marginalized groups—causes artificial intelligence bias today. That fact became glaringly evident in 2018 when Amazon scrapped an AI and machine learning-based recruitment program after figuring out that the algorithm was biased against women.

Amazon’s AI model was programmed to vet candidates by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. But because those hired during that period had been predominantly men, the system deduced that male candidates were preferred over female candidates. This prominent example is part of what inspired the Gemstone team, aptly named Project DeBIAS, to look at hiring algorithms.

“If you train AI on data that already has this systematic disadvantage against a group of people, it’s going to find and replicate those trends,” Mathew said. “The issue is that a lot of coders will think the AI system works fine without trying to understand the distribution of their data in the way of protective attributes such as gender and race.”

Developing the Methodology

Early on, the Project DeBIAS team hypothesized that resumes for people of color are being ranked disproportionately lower on hiring websites like Indeed due to AI bias. To test their hypothesis, they collected 59 anonymized resumes that included attendance at a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and 304 resumes that did not. Then, Mathew and his teammates created an AI model to simulate how an autonomous hiring system would function, training it based on Indeed’s publicly available hiring data. 

“What we’re trying to ensure is that these systems don’t have something baked in where HBCUs are discriminated against,” Mathew said.

The team’s preliminary data analysis shows a trend that aligns with their hypothesis—resumes from individuals who went to HBCUs ranked lower in the hiring system. 

“We’re determining whether this is some sort of spurious correlation or a proper inverse correlation between what the status of your college is and what your ranking is in this Indeed resume ranking algorithm,” Mathew said. “Based on our preliminary findings, we do think we’re going to find an inverse correlation where people who went to HBCUs are ranked lower—and then we plan to find a way to solve for that in the ranking algorithm.”

Becoming Better Researchers

Mathew and junior mathematics majors Seth Gleason, Johnny Rajala and Daniel Zhu contributed their statistics know-how to understand the distribution of data and analyze the components of hiring algorithms. 

“I’m now better able to talk about and understand things from a statistical perspective, like why data is distributed in a certain way,” Mathew said. “And while it may seem obvious, linear algebra ended up being a huge help because computers use matrices, so you kind of need to know how matrices work.”

As they worked through their research work plan and received Institutional Review Board approval for resume data collection, the team worked closely with their team librarian Kate Dohe from UMD Libraries and their advisor, Steve Sin, an associate research scientist in the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at UMD.

“The Project DeBIAS team has become very agile over the last two and a half years,” said Sin, who has worked on detecting bias in emerging technologies. “One of the things they got really strong at is putting together a work plan with branches that says, if A then B. Their work plan helped them continually evaluate whether they were on track, adjusting course as needed.”

Sin noted that the students on the team have grown by “leaps and bounds” since their freshman year in sticking to timelines and collaborating across both the STEM and social sciences aspects of the project.

“Really, all of us are principal investigators on this research because every single one of the 10 of us gets a say on how we carry out the research,” Mathew said. “Not only are we getting experience working on an interdisciplinary team, we also can say that as undergrads we have shaped this research from beginning to end, which is an opportunity I’m pretty grateful for.”

Another important lesson the students learned was how to pivot when their initial research plan wasn’t working. When selecting a proxy for racial demographics, the Gemstone team initially planned to examine redlining—the systematic denial of providing financial services to residents of communities associated with a certain racial group. However, their initial research revealed that very few job applicants include their home addresses on their resumes. 

“Once we saw that redlining wasn’t offering enough data, we pivoted to looking at whether the highest level of education listed was from an HBCU,” Mathew said. “We used that as a proxy for seeing how marginalized populations get treated by these AI systems.”

In April, the Project DeBIAS team presented their research at UMD’s Undergraduate Research Day. Next, they’ll further analyze their preliminary findings, prepare their Gemstone thesis and submit their research results to a journal—and, hopefully, make a difference. 

 “Part of the goal of this whole research is to get it out there and let it add to the field,” Mathew said. “We really want to show that, yes, AI bias is an actual problem—and we might just have a way to fix it or evaluate it.” 

Written by Katie Bemb