His first degrees in mathematics were at the University of Auckland, and he holds an honorary research position there still. He completed his PhD in mathematics at the University of Michigan, before moving on to research positions at Harvard and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
After returning home to New Zealand, John moved from the world of academia to business. After a stint at the BNZ, John spent five years at the IRD. As the manager of compliance modelling, John built a team to deliver the advanced analytics capability needed by a complex organization.
John also built forecasting and resourcing models to inform budget, policy and strategy decisions. He co-developed the IRD's Compliance Management Environment - a platform to link and match data, build social networks, and host models to manage compliance risk via a hybrid systems approach.
More recently as Director of Business Intelligence at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, John led the development of an intelligence system for NZTE, using graph databases, semantic technology, natural language processing, and social network analysis.
John is adept at integrating advanced analytics into the activity of large enterprises. He is experienced in strategy development, performance measurement, financial modelling, forecasting, risk-based resource allocation, and infrastructure development for business intelligence.
John believes that formal training in areas such as mathematics is critical for New Zealand to be able to succeed, and recently contributed his thoughts on this as part of the University of Auckland's outreach programme to students. Watch the video.
Victoria received degrees in biology at the University of Auckland, before moving on to complete a PhD at the University of Michigan. She then held research positions at the Argonne National Laboratory (United States Department of Energy), and then Landcare Research (New Zealand).
Victoria then spent five years working on border-security issues for the Ministry for Primary Industries. Her roles here spanned management, policy and business – and Victoria developed strong skills in working at the interface between strategy and operations and across multiple parts of complex organisations. Victoria has since applied these skills to deliver a range of projects in other organisations.
Victoria enjoys working at all levels of an organization to deliver operational outcomes that are feasible and deliver on strategic goals. She brings a suite of analysis, process and project management skills to the Holt Data Science team.
