Contact information
Email: 2.71828cotner@gmail.com (personal), eric.cotner@shipt.com (work)
Location: San Diego, CA
Social/messaging: LinkedIn, Twitter
Résumé
Short bio
Early life/education
I was born in Orange County, CA, where I lived until I was seven, then moved to northern San Diego county, where I grew up until graduating from Poway High School in 2009. For my bachelors, I went to UC San Diego in La Jolla, and graduated with a degree in physics in 2013. For my graduate studies, I moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA in Westwood, where I specialized in theoretical astroparticle physics, studying exotic dark matter candidates. I received my Masters' in 2014 after passing UCLA's qualifying exam, did several years of intense study and teaching, and (successfully) defended my PhD thesis in May of 2018. Though I left academia for the private sector, I'm still semi-active within the physics community and continue to collaborate with my advisor and others.
Career
During my final years at UCLA, I became interested in machine learning and AI, and decided that I would like to pursue a career in data science. My first position was at American Tire Distributors in Charlotte, NC as a data scientist (starting Feb. 2019), where I found ways to mathematically model and solve supply chain and operations problems. In 2020, the team I was working on at ATD was spun off to form its own corporate start-up called Torqata. My responsibilities were relatively unchanged and I continued to work on supply chain optimization. In the fall of 2021, I joined Shipt, where I currently work on the "offering" team, finding ways to match shoppers to orders. Some interesting problems I have been able to work on involve Monte Carlo simulation of supply chain networks, the optimization of delivery routes under customer demand uncertainty, and clustering products to improve demand forecasts.
Hobbies
My hobbies are mainly diving, cooking, and programming.
I started diving in the spring of 2018 when my dad urged me to get my certification before taking a trip to Roatán, Honduras (the above picture was taken there). I have since become addicted and try to dive as often as I can, in as many new and interesting places as possible. Besides Honduras, I have been to the Great Barrier reef in Australia, Enseñada in Mexico, Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles, wreck diving in Morehead City, NC, and diving in an abandoned quarry in Raleigh. I currently hold my Advanced Open Water certification.
I also enjoy cooking, where my specialty is desserts; crème brûlée is probably my favorite.
Even though I program for a living, I still enjoy casual coding as a hobby.
I've made some music-oriented software to convert iTunes playlists to other formats, and created my own music database in PostgreSQL.
I'm also interested in experimenting with neural networks, especially novel architectures and activation functions.
I also made this entire website from scratch using flask.
(You don't even want to know how many hours I spent tweaking the CSS to get the navbar just right...)
You can find some of my projects on GitHub.