Anne Bauer ’01 is a director of data science at The New York Times. She leads the algorithmic targeting team, a cross-functional team that develops, deploys and tests machine learning models to promote subscription and retention. Previously, she led the algorithmic recommendations team, an applied machine learning team focused on content recommendations across the NYT‘s products. As part of the data science group, she builds models and data products to interpret and act on the company’s data, working with various other groups, including marketing, print circulation and the newsroom.
Before becoming a data scientist, Anne was an astrophysics and cosmology postdoctoral fellow in Barcelona and Munich. She received her doctorate in physics from Yale, and her bachelor of arts degree in physics and computer science from Amherst College.
A. Success in my job depends on listening to people with different expertise, reframing their business objectives as machine learning tasks, and coordinating how we might integrate our data science models and products into their ways of working. This relies heavily on the critical thinking and communication skills that were a focus in many of my classes at Amherst.