Congratulations to Dr. Scott Clark who is the 2016 recipient of the  College of Science’s Young Alumni Award.  Scott is co-founder and CEO of SigOpt in San Francisco, a startup company for tuning complex systems and machine learning models.  He’s a 4th-generation Beaver and earned 3 B.S. degrees (in Physics, Computational Physics and Mathematics,) from Oregon State University in 2008! He did research with Prof. Rubin Landau (Physics) and Prof. Malgo Peszynska (Math) while at OSU.  He earned his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and his M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University and then spent 2 years at Yelp developing black-box Bayesian global optimization techniques.  He subsequently founded SigOpt with his business partners and has raised millions of dollars in start-up funds.  (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sc932)

We were delighted to host Scott in the department and the college, where he talked with current students and visited his old stomping grounds! On Friday evening, November 18th, Scott accepted his award at a banquet in the Memorial Union.  He was accompanied by family members, including his wife, Dr. June Andrews, who also has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell and is a  data scientist at Pinterest.

Scott said that what he liked best about OSU was the encouragement to pursue whatever he wanted and the excellent problem-solving and analytical skills he developed in our physics program!  Thanks Scott, and congratulations!