nimish sheth

Data gaucho, outdoors biped

Hi! I am Nimish. I help people make sense of data. I am interested in the overlap of data and technology — eager to understand what data can reveal and to guide organizations navigate quantitative and qualitative information for effective use.

I live in Northern Virginia, and as an independent consultant am often working remotely with distributed colleagues. I love the outdoors and am into backpacking, distance running, joyrides on my Surly, road trips…and discovering new breweries.

If you want to get in touch, send me a message at nimisheth at gmail dot com.

Data is everywhere. Data touches everything. Data is empowering.

Digging into data is called by different names — statistics, data mining, quantitative analysis, data science, machine learning, operations research. But I believe no matter the label and the problem, to implement meaningful solutions it is critical to understand the intersection and interaction of business, data, technology, and human behavior. It’s what I do.

Get curious. Ask questions. Challenge convention. Make positive impact.

  • I can help from defining the problem and data requirements to designing data flows and data quality processes to analysis, visualization, insights, modeling, and production use.
  • I am fluent in SQL and fairly proficient with R. I want to get better at Python (working on it).
  • I learn fast and can speak the language of business and technology and translate between the two.

What Have I Done

Over the past 22 years I have worked in all aspects of data solutions — as a data miner, data scientist, data integration engineer, analytics engineer, product analyst, implementation consultant, and more.

I was an early, core data miner at Mantas, a start up that pioneered financial crime detection software (subsequently acquired by Oracle). At SRA International, I designed and implemented data integration for the U.S. Dept. of Defense military logistics and in-transit cargo visibility for post 9/11 theater ops. From 2014 - 2021, I provided independent analytics consulting services to leading financial institutions for validating and remediating automated compliance systems used for financial crime monitoring and prevention. At Orum, a fintech startup, I led the development of strategy, framework, and data architecture for mitigating payments risk and financial crime. For more details, take a look at my resume and portfolio.

I step outside every now and then. I’ve rambled through 44 national parks with my wife, mostly tenting and backpacking. I like doing destination marathons and half-marathons, bagging states (visited the 48 contiguous U.S. states), and hitting interesting geographic extreme points: Mt. Whitney (highest point in the lower 48), Badwater Basin (lowest point in the U.S.), Belle Fourche (geographic center of the 50 U.S. states), Lake Itasca (headwaters of the Mississippi), West Quoddy Head (easternmost point in the lower 48), and many more).

The Early Years

In college, I wanted to be a professional photographer1, capturing people and their lives in their day-to-day environment. But as it happened, I became an accidental Math major. After a stint as a freelance photographer and TV series editor2, I earned a Master’s in Industrial Engineering from Virginia Tech, where I did my dissertation on measuring efficiency of production units using Data Envelopment Analysis.

Oh, and somewhere during this time, I worked as a music transfer specialist and did a crazy amount of urban cycling dodging vehicular traffic.

Enjoy browsing and thanks for visiting!

About This Website

All views expressed here are my own. This website is built with the static site generator Jekyll and the Minimal Mistakes theme, and hosted on GitHub Pages. You can read about my experience building this website in a series of posts, starting here.

I learned a lot from several blogs and websites. So, thank you all.

  1. I traveled through India by rail, photographing life as I saw it. I still love photography and showcase some of it on my Instagram account. ↩

  2. I photographed legends of Indian classical music, freelanced with a journalist, edited a weekly TV show, and almost went to film school. ↩