MSBA '27 @ UC Irvine Merage. Data & Business Analytics. 20 months in ad tech at Appier.

Give me a vague brief and a messy spreadsheet — I'll come back with a decision memo, not more questions.

Selected work

3 case studies
Lead · Data analysis

When campaign numbers don't add up, how do you prove the problem isn't the campaign?

A conversion we triggered ourselves came back labelled organic. Tracing why produced a diagnostic path the whole intern team could run, and the ordering of that path mattered more than the answer to any single case.

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Figure B · Root-cause distribution

Most attribution failures were configuration problems, not delivery problems.

Attribution-window misconfiguration65%
Other postback settings25%
Fraud-rule cases (our own test procedure)10%

🟡 Estimated — not a measured distribution across all campaigns.

More work
Business analysis

The team could say what was wrong with the homepage draft. Not what would be right. How do you brief a vendor on that?

A team that could describe what it didn't like, but not what it wanted, was stuck reacting to a vendor's dated-looking draft. Drawing the direction myself, not writing another round of feedback, is what got three vendors and an internal team moving the same way.

FigmaPython
Business analysis · Data analysis

Three meetings couldn't decide who we were selling to, or whether our own sentiment model could survive scrutiny. What actually broke the deadlock?

A five-person team was stuck between a market too small to pitch and a bigger one that would put our own tech on trial. What broke the deadlock wasn't a better argument. It was having each person deliberately argue from the thinking style they didn't have. The market call came first, and it's what decided the technical design, not the other way around.

Pythonpandas
What I do

Most analysts inherit the table after it’s been assembled. I watched tables get assembled wrongly for 20 months.

So when a number looks off, I can usually tell you whether the instrument broke or whether it correctly measured something you didn’t intend to do — two problems that look identical on a dashboard and need opposite responses.

I write down why, not just what.

A query makes a lookup fast; it doesn’t stop the question recurring. The diagnostic reasoning I documented at Appier became the onboarding reference after I left.

I look for the lever, not just the answer.

Chasing advertisers for configuration details didn’t work. Framing the request around what account managers are measured on did — same request, much faster.

Experience
Appier
Built the intern team's first knowledge base from scratch and trained 4 new hires, cutting ramp-up from 1–2 months to 2–3 weeks — while onboarding 6–8 ad campaigns a day across five markets.
ITRI
Took over as de facto lead on a national assessment platform reaching ~200K students a year, then rebuilt its annual reporting pipeline in-house — cutting a multi-week external process to a 30-minute run.
Appier · ITRI — view full résumé →
Now

Right now: finishing this quarter's UCI coursework while fall recruiting opens for Data Analyst / Business Analyst roles.