Eric Peterson

Background

About Eric Peterson

I currently lead the data science and dashboard analytics groups for Scholastic, the world’s largest publisher and distributor of children’s books and a respected creator of educational media and literacy solutions, with total annual revenue approximately $1.5 billion. I work directly with leaders across Scholastic’s many businesses to understand their challenges and their strategic objectives and with my teams create concrete, actionable solutions using machine learning, classical statistics, interactive dashboards, and custom python applications. I am responsible for justifying the ROI of every major data science and dashboarding project with Scholastic finance. My teams lead initiatives within sales, marketing, merchandising, customer service, product development, trade publishing, warehouse operations, fulfillment, logistics, human resources, and executive strategy, and across a broad, overlapping array of business channels: site-based retail, ecommerce, email marketing, catalog direct mail, telemarketing, online subscription services, print magazine subscriptions, field sales, sponsored community programs, public-private partnerships with state governments, and B2B trade sales. My data science acumen developed through long engagement within the complex intersection of publishing, retail, education, public policy, macroeconomics, and population demographics. This has shaped a particular area of expertise as a data science leader: understanding the business problems of a large organization in the context of complex institutional and societal trends, and extracting from this array of interactions compelling opportunities and valuable paths forward for the organization. I have long experience fostering trust and partnership across a diverse array of stakeholders, and I interact easily with both technical and nontechnical audiences. I’m adept at building lean, self-sufficient analytical teams with very low turnover, and I’m a passionate and committed mentor for analysts and junior managers. I have experience retiring and migrating analytical platforms. And I have hands-on skill, honed over two decades, with data programming, machine learning, classical statistics, data visualization, and project implementation. In my personal time, I enjoy composing music, writing, the arts, traveling and cycling with my wife, and conducting my own baseball sabermetric research.