Jacqueline Nolis

Whenever someone asks me whether I would recommend writing a book, I always say, “Only if you do it with a co-author.” But that’s not actually the full picture. It should be “Only if you do it with a co-author who is as fun, warm, generous, smart, experienced, and caring as Jacqueline.” I’m not sure what it’s like working with a “normal” co-author, because Jacqueline has always been amazing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to work with her on this project.

It would be easy for someone as accomplished as Jacqueline to be intimidating. She has a PhD in industrial engineering, got $100,000 for winning the third season of the reality television show King of the Nerds, was a director of analytics, and started her own successful consulting firm. She’s spoken at conferences across the country and is regularly asked back by her alma mater to advise math undergraduates (her major) on careers. When she spoke at an online conference, the compliments about her presentation flooded the chat, such as “the best so far,” “excellent presentation,” “really helpful,” and “great, dynamic presentation.” But Jacqueline never makes anyone feel inferior or bad for not knowing something; rather, she loves making difficult concepts accessible, such as in her great presentation called “Deep learning isn’t hard, I promise.”

Her personal life is equally impressive: she has a wonderfully vibrant house in Seattle with her wife, son, two dogs, and three cats. I’m hoping that she might also one day adopt a certain co-author to fill out the very few empty spaces. She and her wife, Heather, have even given a presentation to a packed audience of 1,000 people eager to hear about how they used R to deploy machine learning models to production at T-Mobile. They also possibly have the best meet-cute story of all time: they met on the aforementioned show King of the Nerds, where Heather was also a competitor.

I’m very thankful to Jacqueline, who could have earned much more money for much less aggravation by doing anything other than writing this book with me. It is my hope that our work encourages aspiring and junior data scientists to become contributors to our community who are as great as Jacqueline is.