Sam Rosen - CV

Education


Duke University
May 2026
Ph.D., Statistical Science; Advisor: Jason Xu
Dissertation Title: Convex Optimization Methods for Structured Statistical Problems
  • Summer Research Fellowship (2025)
  • Honorable Mention for Teaching Assistant of the Year (2023)
  • Bass Connections Fellowship (2022)
University of Massachusetts: Amherst
May 2021
B.S. in Computer Science; B.S. in Mathematics
GPA: 3.9/4.0

Work Experience


Pinterest
Summer 2024

Machine Learning Engineering Intern

  • Trained and tuned deep learning models for content-to-content recommendation systems.
  • Conducted successful A/B testing to show efficacy of changes on production systems.
Cruise LLC (General Motors)
Summer 2022

Machine Learning Acceleration Intern

  • Added robust standard error calculations to internal simulation metrics.
  • Implemented Kernel Density Estimation and Bandwidth Selection for automatically analyzing performance degradation.
Genentech
Summer 2021

Research and Development Intern

  • Lead development of epiviz.gl, a JS framework for visualizing genomic data with WebWorkers and WebGL.
  • Developed data selection, rendering, navigation with a pseudo grammar-of-graphics implementation.
Datadog
Sept. - Dec. 2020

Software Engineering Intern (Cloud Integrations team)

  • Optimized and bolstered Azure crawlers responsible for crawling millions of data points an hour.
  • Debugged and implemented fixes for issues found by customers in production for crawled metrics.
DraftKings
Summer 2019

DevOps Intern

  • Created a scalable application for live tracking of release branches to production using AWS Lambda.
  • Designed serverless architecture scalable to arbitrary codebase size with complete up-to-date release data.
  • Designed DynamoDB schema and frontend with React for a responsive efficient API and user interface.
Johns Hopkins University: Applied Physics Lab
Summer 2018/2017

Software Engineering Intern (Large-scale analytics group)

  • Developed graph analytics using Java and functional programming with Gremlin for compliant graph databases.
  • Programmed low-memory implementations of machine learning algorithms for training on arbitrarily large data.
  • Created analytics for graph multi-edge merging, time-series, and data fusion using Java and MapReduce.
  • Developed random forest algorithm on a distributed data system for classifying attributes on graph vertices.
General Dynamics Mission Systems
Summer 2016

Software Engineering Intern

  • Worked with a partner to build a microservice acting as a REST backend to serve PDF’s with Spring.
  • Created a service to read generated reports through a REST API on a dynamic front-end with React.

Publications


Teaching Experience


Duke STA663L, Statistical Computing and Computation in Python (TA)
Spring 2022, 2024, 2025, 2026
Duke STA523, Programming for Statistical Science in R (TA)
Fall 2025
Duke Statical Science Masters' Boot Camp (Instructor)
Fall 2023, 2024 and 2025
Duke STA313, Data Visualization (TA)
Spring 2023
  • Developed material/guest lecturer as part of BASS Connections
Duke STA198L, Intro to Global Health Data Science (TA)
Fall 2022
UMass MATH331 (Grader)
Spring 2020
UMass MATH127 (UGTA)
Fall 2018, Spring 2019

Selected Projects


  • Developed for Genentech (advised by: Jayaram Kancherla) to visualize genomic data seamlessly via declarative specifications and WebGL.
  • Designed to visualize millions of data points and entire chromosomes at 60 FPS with high precision.
  • Created a no-dependency package to make asynchronous logging easy with a highly customizable API.
  • Published on PyPI with complete test code coverage, continuous integration, and extensive documentation.
  • Completed semester long project researching the NP-HARD problem of the most efficient way to pack circles.
  • Formulated an algorithm which packs circles in linear time achieving competitive densities near 70 percent.

Miscellaneous