Invited Speakers
Chris Anderson, Professor in European Politics and Policy, London School of Economics and Political Science
Professor Anderson is a leading scholar in the political economy of sports and of comparative political behavior. He is a pioneer in applying analytic and statistical expertise to quantitative soccer analytics. This work has sought to produce data-based tools for building more effective teams, optimizing player and team performance, and managing clubs. Professor Anderson’s best-selling book on football analytics, co-authored with David Sally, is titled “The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong.” Anderson is also a frequent commentator on the use of analytics in football and big data in high-performing organizations and an invited speaker at a number of industry and university events. A native of Germany, he was educated at the University of Cologne, Virginia Tech, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he received his Ph.D. in political science.
Jerry Bo, Professional Sports Gambler and Radio Host on Houston’s Moneyline ESPN 97.5
Jerry Bo and his radio co-host Joshua Jordan report the latest news and analysis from the world of fantasy football and handicapping. Their fast-moving show MoneyLine is every Sunday morning from 10 am-Noon CT live on ESPN Houston 97.5 & 92.5 FM or anytime here at espn975.com. Bo is also a writer for The Sports Gambling Podcast Network.
James Disch, Associate Professor, Department of Sport Management, Rice University
Professor Disch has extensive experience in sport analytics and teaching. He has been a Rice faculty member since 1973. He served as chair of the Kinesiology Department from 1995-2001 and was instrumental in the founding of the Department of Sport Management. He has directed the department’s track in sport analytics since 2013. Disch has also served as an adjunct professor in the Educational Psychology Department and a visiting professor in Health and Physical Education at the University of Houston. He has published a number of articles and is co-author of “Measurement and Evaluation in Human Performance” with Jim Morrow, Dale Mood, and Allen Jackson. Disch has an M. Ed. in physical education from the University of Houston and a P.E.D. from Indiana University where he focused on physical education with an emphasis on biomechanics, statistics, and measurement.
Ed Feng, Founder of The Power Rank
Ed Feng is an expert in sports analytics and data science. For over a decade, he has developed his own computer algorithms to produce the most accurate football and March Madness predictions. His website The Power Rank is also devoted to education about analytics and data visualization. Feng has presented at numerous conferences in the U.S. and abroad, and has contributed articles to FiveThirtyEight, Grantland and Deadspin. Media outlets such as Forbes, Business Week and Bleacher Report have featured his numbers and predictions. Feng has a Ph.D. in applied math and chemical engineering from Stanford University.
Hua Gong, Assistant Professor, Sport Analytics, Rice University
Professor Gong leads the department’s efforts in teaching and research of sport analytics at Rice University. His research in sport analytics and sport economics has been published in peer-review journals and widely presented at academic conferences. During the 2015-2016 NBA season, Gong was a statistical analyst for the New York Knicks where he was responsible for collecting basketball data, managing databases, performing statistical analysis, and building data visualization apps. From 2013-2015, he was a video and analytics assistant for the Texas A&M men’s basketball team. Gong has a Ph.D. in sport and entertainment management from the University of South Carolina, an M.S. in sport management from Texas A&M University.
Declan Hill, Associate Professor of Investigations, University of New Haven
Professor Hill specializes in organized crime and corruption, specifically in international sport. His book “The Fix: Organized crime and soccer” has become a bestseller in 21 languages, optioned in Hollywood, and helped start 34 police investigations. His book, “The Insider’s Guide to Match-Fixing in Football” is specifically written for sports officials and has been published in Japanese, Lithuanian, and English. Hill was an investigative journalist and news presenter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Stories have included, the murder of the capo of the Canadian mafia, honor killings in Kurdistan, blood feuds in Kosovo, the killings of Filipino journalists, the links between the Russian mafia and top-level sportspeople, and the underground railway to protect Iraqi women. Hill has a Ph.D. from the University of Oxford in corruption and organized crime studies. He is also a keen amateur boxer who trains in Havana, Cuba.
Ben Jedlovec, Senior Director, Baseball Data Quality, Major League Baseball
Prior to his appointment with Major League Baseball in 2018, Ben Jedlovec was president of Baseball Info Solutions where he managed the company’s day-to-day operations and data collection efforts. While at Baseball Info Solutions, he co-authored volumes III and IV of “The Fielding Bible” with John Dewan. The book reveals a revolutionary approach to fielding analysis in Major League Baseball. Jedlovec has a degree in kinesiology and statistics from Rice University.
Daniel Kowal, Dobelman Family Assistant Professor, Rice University
Professor Kowal develops statistical methodology and algorithms for massive data sets with complex dependence structures, such as functional, time series, and spatial data. His recent work focuses on Bayesian models for prediction and inference, as well as scalable approximations to complex models. Through this work, Professor Kowal addresses complex questions in fields such as economics, public health and policy, biomedical engineering, finance, and astronomy. He has a Ph.D. in statistics from Cornell University.
Brian Macdonald, Special Faculty in Sports Analytics, Department and Statistics and Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Macdonald is currently a special faculty member in sports analytics in the Department and Statistics and Data Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He was previously the director of sports analytics in the Stats & Information Group at ESPN, director of hockey analytics with the Florida Panthers Hockey Club, and an associate professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at West Point. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Lafayette College, Easton, PA, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.
Tony Miller, Executive Director of Race & Sports, Golden Nugget Las Vegas
Tony Miller started his career in the race and sports industry in 1985. For the past 15 years, he has brought extensive gaming expertise in bookmaking and in hospitality service and management to direct the Vegas Sportsbook at the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. He is a veteran in using a variety of techniques and statistical analyses in bookmaking to create spreads and betting lines, various props, and future indexes for most sports. Throughout his career, he has opened for sportsbooks in England and Australia, and a number of popular sports wager properties in Las Vegas, including The Original Superbook, Caesars Palace, Station Casinos, Hard Rock Cafe.
Wayne Winston, Professor Emeritus Operations and Decision Technologies, Indiana University
Professor Winston has taught classes or consulted for many organizations including Cisco, Cummins Engine, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Verizon, Microsoft, Cisco, US Navy, US Army, Ford, 3M, and GM. He has consulted for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and New York Knicks, and is also a two-time Jeopardy! Champion. Professor Winston has written over a dozen books, including Marketing Analytics: Data-Driven Techniques with Microsoft Excel, Business Analytics: Data Analysis & Decision Making with S. Christian Albright, and Microsoft Excel 2016 Data Analysis and Business Modeling, Fifth Edition. He has authored 25 research articles and the spreadsheet modeling coursework for Harvard Business School Publishing. He has an M.S. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Yale University.
Event Organizers
Katherine Ensor, Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics and Director of the Center for Computational Finance and Economic Systems (CoFES)
Professor Ensor has been a Rice faculty member since 1987 and is one of the founding members of the statistics department. As an expert in many areas of modern statistics, Professor Ensor applies innovative statistical techniques to answer important questions in science, engineering, and business with a specific focus on the environment, energy, and finance. She is an expert in multivariate time series, categorical data, spatial-temporal stochastic processes, and sampling. She established CoFES in 2002, which supports education and research in quantitative finance at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She is president-elect of the American Statistical Association’s Board of Directors, is a member of the National Academies Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS), and serves on the Board of Directors of the NSF Institute on Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM). She has an M.S. in mathematics from Arkansas State University and a Ph.D. in statistics from Texas A&M University.
John Dobelman, Professor in the Practice of Statistics and Associate Director, CoFES
Professor Dobelman has a strong background in engineering and leadership. Prior to joining Rice, he was a pricing scientist in the Department of Science and Research (S&R) at PROS Revenue Management. Before PROS, he owned and operated a financial engineering laboratory. Prior to his statistics career, he was lead engineer and manager for engineering, program management and implementation engineering/installation for terminal air traffic control communications, surveillance, and navigation and landing systems for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Facilities & Equipment program. Dobelman has a Ph.D. in statistics from Rice University. He also has a master’s degree in public management, entrepreneurship and international business from Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Management.
Clark Haptonstall, Program Director and Chair, Department of Sport Management, Rice University
Professor Haptonstall has been a Rice faculty member since 2003. In addition to his current appointment as chair of Rice’s Department of Sport Management, he teaches courses in sport marketing, sport public relations, sport ethics, and sports journalism. He has extensive experience working in professional and college sports, including serving as sports information director at The Citadel and Marshall University, and working for the Huntington Cubs minor league baseball team and Furman University. For seven years, he ran his own full-service sports marketing and public relations firm. He has an M.S. in athletic administration from Marshall University and a Ph.D. in sports administration from Florida State University.