UMD Graduate Di Zou Leads Data-Driven Decision Making as Director of Baseball Systems for Baltimore Orioles

Di Zou (B.S. '09, mathematics) helps the Baltimore Orioles make data-driven decisions as the
team’s director of baseball systems
Written by Emily Nunez  

Like many people born in Baltimore, Di Zou (B.S. ’09, mathematics) spent much of his childhood
at Camden Yards watching the Baltimore Orioles play. He fondly recalls one of his favorite
baseball moments: the second playoff game of the 2014 American League Division Series when
the Orioles defeated the Detroit Tigers.

“That was about as exciting as I’ve seen Camden Yards,” Zou said.

Now, Zou’s workplace overlooks that same stadium, and he’s doing more to help his hometown
team than merely cheering from the crowd. As the Orioles’ director of baseball systems, he
builds software and tools to manage a mound of data—everything from the trajectory of a ball to
the exact position of a pitcher’s wrist. Coaches, scouts and other baseball insiders use this data
to strategize and make informed draft decisions.

“Now that the season has started and there are games every day, I make sure all of the data is
getting imported and processed correctly,” Zou said. “We talk to coaches and scouts, and it’s
really cool to see them use the reports and the data we provide.”

Di Zou posed for a photo at Ed Smith Stadium, the Orioles' spring training stadium,
following an interview with the team's analytics department in March 2017.
He ultimately got the job and started work the following month.

Despite his lifelong love for baseball, Zou never planned to work in professional sports. He
always enjoyed working with numbers, so when he enrolled at the University of Maryland in
2006, he declared a major in mathematics.

It was only after taking a programming math class during his senior year at Maryland that Zou
started considering careers that melded math with computer science. He later learned that his
love of problem-solving could easily be applied to programming.

“I thought, ‘Well, if my favorite math class is actually a programming class, I should do
programming as a job after college,” Zou said. “Programming is sort of like a puzzle. There are
always challenges while writing code, and it’s a lot of fun to overcome these technological
issues and get the computer to do something for you.”

After graduating, Zou landed his first programming job at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory in
Aberdeen, Maryland, where he provided cloud-based computing support. In the years that
followed, he went on to several software engineering positions—first in Baltimore and then in
the Greater Boston area—and he picked up a variety of technical skills along the way.
“There’s usually a lot of learning on the job for programming,” Zou explained. “I learned different
programming languages, computer science theory, how to efficiently do certain problems and
tasks, different types of software architectures, and how to handle a lot of data.”

As a fan of both numbers and baseball, Zou started following baseball analytics in college after
reading the book “Moneyball,” which told the true story of how the Oakland Athletics used player
performance data to gain a competitive advantage. Zou has been an avid follower of analytics
sites like Fangraphs and Baseball Prospectus ever since, and in 2017, that reading paid off
when he saw a job posting for a developer in the Orioles’ analytics department.

“When I saw that, I thought, ‘Wow, this is right up my alley, and it would be cool to work for the
Orioles,’” Zou said. “I love baseball and I love baseball analytics, so I figured, ‘Why not?’”

Zou ultimately got the job, joining two others on the analytics team. He hit the ground running
and began building software and databases to help the Orioles manage a massive influx of
player performance data. Zou was named the manager of baseball systems in 2019 and
received another promotion to his current position in 2021.

During his six years with the Orioles, Zou has seen the team’s analytics department quadruple
in size. He says the demand for more sophisticated data in professional sports has risen
dramatically since he first delved into baseball analytics in college.

“When I graduated from the University of Maryland, sports analytics weren’t really a thing, and
there were not many sports analytics jobs,” Zou said. “Those jobs really started to take off in the
last six to eight years. It’s getting to the point where you can’t just have one person working on
Excel—you need to write all this dedicated software to handle the volume of data coming to
sports.”

That data continues to grow. Through the use of radar and optical tracking, the MLB collects
data on every single pitch—and that’s just the start.

“At all moments, we know exactly where the ball is in space and time,” Zou said.
“At the major league level, we get measurements 300 times per second, so we know how much the ball
moves and how fast it is spinning.” 

These technologies have become so advanced that the MLB now tracks the quick and subtle
movements made by players’ arms and legs.

“As the pitcher throws the ball, we know how fast his arm is moving, how fast his leg is moving,
where his ankle is, where his wrist is—that’s the type of data we get,” Zou said. “It’s hard to say
what the next big development will be. From a biomechanics standpoint, it would be cool to
know where a player’s fingers are on the ball. We don’t track that yet.”

Zou helps create and manage the systems that store this data, and he works closely with data
scientists who build machine learning and statistical models to make that information relevant to
coaches and scouts. He credits the mathematics program at UMD for giving him analytical skills
that have helped him succeed in this role.

“It helped with a lot of the critical thinking needed for what I’ve been doing,” Zou said. “Also,
since I now work with a lot of data scientists, the math background really helps with
understanding what they do.”

While Zou’s job is full of technical challenges, he relishes the opportunity to put his problem-
solving skills to the test and ultimately help the Orioles win more games. At the end of the day,
as he sits in his office next to Camden Yards, Zou is exactly where he wants to be.
“I like to joke that I get paid to watch baseball all day,” Zou said. “That’s the best part.”

Written by Emily Nunez 

Dmitry Dolgopyat, Richard Greene and Zhanqing Li have been named Distinguished University Professors—the highest academic honor bestowed by the University of Maryland. They will be honored at the university’s annual Faculty and Staff Convocation on September 14, 2022.

“These faculty members are exceptionally deserving of being named Distinguished University Professors,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). “I was proud to nominate them for consideration, and I celebrate and honor their inspirational commitment to CMNS and our students through their teaching, research and service.”

Dolgopyat, Greene and Li join more than 50 colleagues in CMNS who have been named Distinguished University Professors since 1980. Distinguished University Professors are faculty members who have been recognized nationally and internationally for the importance of their scholarly achievements. UMD’s president, along with a committee composed of the provost and seven faculty members—including several Distinguished University Professors—from diverse disciplines select the honorees each year.

Dmitry Dolgopyat

Dmitry Dolgopyat. Photo courtesy of same. Click image to download hi-res version.

Dolgopyat is a world-renowned leader in the Department of Mathematics whose work focuses on dynamical systems, a field that studies the time evolution of natural and abstract systems.

Since joining UMD in 2002 as an associate professor, he gave an invited talk at the International Congress of Mathematicians, was awarded the Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems, received the Annales Henri Poincaré Prize, was invited to give a plenary talk at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics and was elected as a foreign member of Academia Europaea.

Over his career, he has published 78 papers and mentored more than a dozen students and postdocs. He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Modern Dynamics, Nonlinearity, Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems, Annales Henri Poincaré, and the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.

He received his diploma in mathematics from Moscow State University in Russia in 1994 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1997.

Richard Greene

Richard Greene. Credit: Faye Levine. Click image to download hi-res version.

Greene joined UMD as a professor in 1989 to lead the Center for Superconductivity Research (now called the Quantum Materials Center) in the Department of Physics as its founding director.

He is a pioneer in the study of superconductivity and the synthesis and study of advanced quantum materials. He discovered the first superconducting polymer, discovered several new quantum phenomena in complex materials and detected magnetic spin waves optically for the first time. Greene’s work has had a large impact on the fields of both materials science and physics.

He has published 435 articles that have been cited more than 33,000 times, mentored more than 20 students and postdocs, and received continuous funding from the National Science Foundation since 1993. Before joining UMD, Greene was a researcher at IBM.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The APS named its dissertation award for experimental condensed matter physics in his honor.

Greene earned his B.S. in physics from MIT in 1960 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967.

Zhanqing Li

Zhanqing Li. Photo courtesy of same. Click image to download hi-res version.

Li, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center, has made major contributions in atmospheric and environmental sciences that have improved our understanding of the Earth’s climate and air quality through remote sensing, experiments and modeling.

Li is a world leader in atmospheric physics, aerosols, clouds, radiation and their impact on climate change and air pollution. One of his discoveries was that aerosols—tiny airborne particles—in air and in clouds played a major role in trapping and reflecting heat and in modulating cloud and precipitation. His work redefined how scientists view the roles of clouds in Earth’s climate, and his models have been used by NASA and others for calculating the global energy budget and monitoring wildfires and air quality.

He is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Chinese-American Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. Li also received a Humboldt Research Award and the AGU’s Yoram J. Kaufman Outstanding Research and Unselfish Cooperation Award, among other honors. 

During his 20 years at UMD, he has mentored 23 Ph.D. students and 20 postdocs, been awarded $16 million in research grants, and published more than 380 peer-reviewed journal articles that have been cited more than 25,000 times. He was named a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science in 2020 and 2021 and one of the top 100 environmental scientists in the world by research.com. Many of his papers were influential in the IPCC assessment report and he is a contributor to the 2021 report for addressing climate change. He has served as editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and Advances in Meteorology.

He received his B.S. and M.S. from the Department of Meteorology at China’s Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology in 1983 and 1986, respectively. After graduating with his Ph.D. in 1991 from the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at McGill University, he worked as a Canadian government researcher until 2001 when he joined UMD as a professor.

This article was copied with premission from https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/4968

We welcomed three assistant professors, two professors, a visiting professor and a lecturer.

Shiferaw Berhanu

Shiferaw joined our department as a Visiting Professor. He moved to Maryland from Temple University. His research interests are in micro local analysis, several complex variables, and PDEs. He received a B.Sc. from Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers. Shiferaw is a Fellow of the AMS, an Associate Fellow of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences.

Tristan Buckmaster

Tristan joined our department as a Full Professor. He received a B.Sc. in Monash University, an M.Sc. in the University of Bonn, and a Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig/Max Planck Institute. After graduating, Tristan was a Courant Instructor at NYU before moving to Princeton as an Assistant Professor. Tristan’s area of research is the mathematical analysis of partial differential equations. Most of his results are related to the equations of fluid mechanics. His best-known work is the proof that weak solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations of fluid dynamics are not unique in general. Tristan has many other substantial results on the Euler equations and on weak turbulence for the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. He has received many awards for his work, including the Clay Research Award in 2019.

Jamie Conway

Jamie joined our department as a Lecturer. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech (with John Etnyre). He was then a postdoc at UC Berkeley before moving to the D.C. area during the pandemic. Jamie’s research interests are contact and symplectic geometry. He also typesets books specializing in Hebrew/Yiddish.

Abba Gumel

Abba Gumel joined our department as the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed Chair in Mathematics. He holds a joint appointment with the Department of Biology and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology. Abba moved to Maryland from Arizona State University where he held the title of Foundation Professor. Abba is a distinguished mathematician working in the area of disease modeling. He is recognized as a major international figure in mathematical epidemiology. Abba is a highly cited prolific researcher that received many honors and awards throughout his career. He was the 2021 American Mathematical Society Einstein Public Lecturer, a recipient of the Bellman Prize, a Fellow of the African Scientific Institute, a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science, and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences. This year he was elected as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Deep Ray

Deep Ray will join our department in spring 2023 as an Assistant Professor and hold a joint appointment with the Insitute for Physical Science and Technology. Deep received his Ph.D. from the Tata Institute in Bangalore, India. His advisors were Praveen Chandrashekar (Tata Institute) and Sid Mishra (ETH Zurich). After graduation, Deep was a postdoc in EPFL, Switzerland, Rice University, and more recently at USC. Deep works in numerical analysis, scientific computing, machine learning, and data science. He obtained significant results in his work on high-order schemes for flow problems and deep learning-based shock capturing techniques. His ongoing work is on Bayesian inference using deep learning priors.

Haizhao Yang

Haizhao joined our department as an Assistant Professor. He received his M.S. from the University of Texas at Austin and Ph.D. from Stanford (a student of Lexing Ying). He was a postdoc at Duke (working with Daubechies), an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, and an Assistant Professor at Purdue. Haizhao received an NSF CAREER Award and an ONR Young Investigator award. He is working on many aspects of data science, including deep learning and reinforced learning, to which he made significant contributions.

Boyu Zhang

Boyu joined our department as an Assistant Professor. He received his B.S. from Peking University, his Ph.D. from Harvard University (with Clifford Taubes). He was a postdoc at Princeton before being hired by Princeton as an Assistant Professor.  Boyu’s research covers categorification, gauge theory, geometric analysis, foliation theory, and low-dimensional topology.  He has made significant contributions throughout low-dimensional topology, gauge theory, and symplectic geometry.