Sander Mooij

Background

About Sander Mooij

I'm a theoretical physicist transformed into a (lead) software engineer and data scientist with 15 years of professional experience. I'm working for Opturion, an Australian / Chilean company for IT services and development. Nowadays I'm mostly working in optimization projects. We optimize the transport logistics of the two leading forestry companies in Chile. Next to that, for one of them we are currently developing a model that optimizes the dispatch of bushfire-fighting resources, focussing not only on the ongoing ones, but also on the upcoming ones! In most projects I work as a team leader, connecting our technical skills to the customer's needs. However, I am still involved in the actual engineering part as well. My previous job was in data science, in the automotive industry at Inchcape Digital in Santiago de Chile. Here I was, among other things, responsible for the construction of AI machine learning models and their business implementation. Projects included models estimating the actual value of second-hand cars, Customer Lifetime Value analysis, time series for sales forecasts and statistical models measuring the efficiency of new campaigns. During my PhD and three postdoctoral appointments I have mainly worked on establishing a connection between extreme small-scale physics and extreme large-scale physics. This theoretical research addresses the influence of quantum mechanical processes on the expansion of the universe, from the Big Bang until now. I have written 20+ scientific papers, all published in high impact journals, and given 100+ talks to audiences varying from high school students to academic experts in the field. In both of these two environments, academic and business, the challenge is always two-fold. Of course, differential equations need to be solved or non-linear optimization models need to be built to get to valuable results. However, the importance of actually formulating and subsequently reducing the problem at hand to its essentials cannot be overestimated. And even if "in the real world" nobody cares about the beginning of the universe, having studied that for so many years is extremely beneficial in this second challenge.