Lara Kattan

Biography

Lara Kattan teaches Data Analysis with R and Python at Booth. Outside of Booth, she is a senior data scientist and instructor at Metis Data Science Bootcamp. Prior to her time at Metis, Kattan was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. in the Risk practice where she served financial institutions and insurance companies. She built machine learning and risk models using R, Python, SAS and big data technologies such as Hadoop (map/reduce), Hive, and Spark (PySpark).

Kattan holds an MA in public policy (econometrics concentration) from the University of Chicago, and a BA in economics and political science from Northwestern University. She is currently pursuing dual master’s degrees in computer science and computational math.

The statistical elegance of data science is what animates Kattan the most, but she gets her biggest joy from demystifying the math for all audiences. If forced to snap out of her mathematical reveries, she's probably doing yoga, riding a bike, or drinking too much coffee.

Academic Areas

• Econometrics and Statistics
• Operations Management