Dr. Aleksandar (Sasha) Tomic is Associate Dean for Strategy, Innovation, & Technology, and Program Director of Master of Science in Applied Economics at the Boston College’s Woods College of Advancing Studies. He also holds appointments as Associate Professor of Practice in Economics department of Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences and Operations Management Department of Carroll School of Management. In addition to managing the MS in Applied Economics, Dr. Tomic leads strategic initiatives at the College, especially in areas of online education. Prior to joining BC, Dr. Tomic was Associate Professor at Mercer University, Professor at the Jack Welch Management Institute in Herndon, Virginia; Principal in Econometrics with HENDYPLAN, S.A. in Luxembourg; Associate Professor of Economics and Director of Graduate Programs in Business at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia; and Assistant Professor of Economics and co-founder and Director of the Center for Economic Analysis at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia.
In his career, Dr. Tomic has developed, grown, and turned around academic and research programs. He has written scholarly papers published in international journals and refereed books addressing topics such as EMU, the behavior of political agents, racial disparities in policing and sentencing, and impact of college athletics on universities reputation. He is a frequent lecturer and commentator on economic issues at local/regional/national/international level.
In addition to his academic endeavors, Dr. Tomic has managed and participated in Eurostat-sponsored, complex, multi-year, multinational projects in economic statistics, business cycle forecasting, and macroeconometrics. In these projects, Dr. Tomic provided the bridge between subject-matter experts and software developers to provide tools used in both research and production environment at the client organizations.
He earned his MA and PhD in Applied Economics from Clemson University.

Wendy is a senior data scientist/engineer at Kaggle (a Google Cloud company). She has worked extensively on innovative machine learning competitions, and is currently focusing on data infrastructure in-house. She has a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and Bachelor’s and Master’s in Electrical Engineering

Juan Manuel Contreras, Ph.D., leads a data science team at Uber that works with the company’s legal team to develop analyses and arguments based on data science, economics, and the law. Previously, he led data science teams at Even, a fintech startup, and the Democratic National Committee. Juan Manuel was trained as a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard and Princeton universities.

David Meza currently serves as a Sr. Data Scientist for the NASA’s Office of Human Capital in D.C. He previously served as Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). During his tenure at NASA, he has worked in all aspects of the Information Technology field developing and deploying several IT systems in use at JSC. His desire to improve IT processes and systems lead him to earn a Master’s certificates in Project Management and Six Sigma in addition to becoming a NASA certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt. Mr. Meza is conducting research in People Analytics, Automatic Classification algorithms, domain-specific search interfaces, topic modeling, data-driven visualization and a Bayesian network model for risk analysis. He holds a Master’s in Engineering Management from the University of Houston Clear Lake where he is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Education.