# John Dryden

**Senior Data Scientist** — Los Angeles, CA, United States

> Senior data scientist with 15+ years across operations research, statistical modeling, machine learning, and GenAI. Has built end-to-end data products and led cross-functional teams across consumer, enterprise, and industrial domains.

Career Archetype: **Beacon Trailblazer** (RE-MG) — One of the first Beacon Trailblazers on Saywise

## Links

- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/johncdryden

## Experience

### Senior Data Scientist, Contract, UP.LABS (2026-01 – present)
Santa Monica, CA · Leads architecture and hands-on development of a decision-intelligence platform supporting a $10M+ enterprise AI engagement for a global energy company. Integrates 90+ structured indicators with LLM-retrieved unstructured sources to surface opportunities and risks. Designed a proposer-verifier workflow that checks facts, evidence, and sources with both deterministic and LLM-based evaluation.

### Co-Founder, CreationSpace (2024-01 – present)
Los Angeles Metropolitan Area · Delivering high quality consumer insights to brands of all sizes

### CTO & Co-Founder, CreationSpace (backed by Bain & Company), CREATIONSPACE (BACKED BY BAIN, HUSTLE FUND) (2022-09 – 2026-01)
Los Angeles Metropolitan Area · Led data science workstreams for 25+ private-equity due diligences and corporate strategy engagements. Estimated causal revenue impact of restaurant renovations with matching methods. Built an experimentation and customer lifetime value framework for a national entertainment property, supporting marketing-offer tests for 50K+ recipients. Developed latent-class segmentations for 3+ clients, built purchase-propensity models for thousands of B2B accounts, and analyzed price elasticity and seasonality across 5K+ e-commerce SKUs.

### Senior Operations Research Analyst, Team Lead, Millennium Space Systems, A Boeing Company (2016-07 – 2022-08)
El Segundo, CA · Founding data science hire who built and managed a six-person data science and engineering team supporting manufacturing, program scheduling, supply chain, and enterprise operations. Improved operational forecasts for small samples (n < 20) using informative Bayesian priors. Designed and deployed database schemas, data pipelines, KPIs, reports, and governance standards with manufacturing and enterprise teams. Migrated legacy inventory and manufacturing data to Deltek Costpoint ERP as a single source of truth.

### Program Coordinator, Sanger Leadership Center, University of Michigan Ross School of Business (2015-03 – 2016-05)
Ann Arbor, MI · Developed relationships with institutional partners Provided event and logistic support for Sanger Leadership Center’s full portfolio of programs

### GRE Instructor, Kaplan (2014-09 – 2016-05)
Ann Arbor, MI · Taught GRE, GMAT, and ACT preparation to classes of 5-25 students

### Founder, BeTheHill (2014-08 – 2016-06)
• As a solo founder, conducted customer discovery interviews and developed business proposition. Shut down before launch

### Senior Analyst, THINKVINE (ACQ. BY IGNITE TECHNOLOGIES) (2013-02 – 2014-08)
Cincinnati, OH · Built marketing mix models with a proprietary agent-based framework. Produced revenue forecasts with 97%+ holdout accuracy that informed client budget allocation across marketing channels.

### Operations Research Analyst, THE KROGER COMPANY (2009-10 – 2013-02)
Cincinnati, OH · Modeled checkout processes with discrete-event simulation to compare service levels across labor scenarios. Advised on new technology that raised front-end throughput up to 13% without adding labor.

### Research and Development Team Member, Kroger (2008-08 – 2008-09)
Designed 3 VisualBasic .NET applications in 1 month for Windows Mobile handhelds for in-store trial solutions Collaborated on design process for a new product aimed at revolutionizing the consumer experience Simulated several logistical configurations using Simul8 to propose processes improvements

## Education

### B.S. in Management Science & Engineering; Science, Technology and Society, Stanford University (2009-06)
Activities and societies: Talisman, Alpha Phi Alpha, Associated Students of Stanford University, Residential Education, Alpha Kappa Psi, Residential Computing

### Master of Science - MS in Operations Research Engineering, University of Southern California (2023-06)

### Deep Learning, Parts I and II, fast.ai

### Public Policy and International Affairs Junior Summer Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Completed coursework in statistics, international policy, labor economics and communication

### Weston High School

## Skills

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Data Science, Data Analysis, Leadership, Operations Research, R, Python (Programming Language), Scikit-Learn, Microsoft Excel, Market Research, Business Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Discrete Event Simulation, Analytics, Public Speaking, Retail, Costpoint, Data Mining, Marketing Research, Process Improvement, Microsoft Office, VBA, Forecasting, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, Experimental Design, Model Evaluation, Simulation, KPI Design, Data Visualization, SQL, Snowflake, Databricks, LangGraph, OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Vector Databases, XGBoost, statsmodels, Prophet, Tableau, Streamlit, AWS, Azure, GitHub

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Source: https://saywise.com/member3241 (last modified 2026-10-12T19:46:15.898Z)