Speaker Profile

Scott Powers is in his first year as an Assistant Professor of Sport Analytics and of Statistics at Rice University. He is currently building out the curricula for several courses that belong to the new Sport Analytics major in Rice's Department of Sport Management. He collaborates on research projects with a handful of talented undergraduate students through the research lab he established this year. Scott's research expertise is in the measurement of individual contributions to team success, as well as the projection of player performance. His favorite tools for these problems tend to come from statistical machine learning (regularized regression, gradient boosting, etc.) although he is also partial to Bayesian models when appropriate (and when the computational cost is reasonable).

Scott completed his PhD in Statistics at Stanford University in 2017. From there, he worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers in R&D for five years and then spent one season as an Assistant General Manager with the Houston Astros. Along the way, he has done consulting for the Oakland Athletics (baseball), AZ Alkmaar (soccer) and Zelus Analytics (baseball and soccer).

Scott lives in Houston with his wife, Corinne, and their 1-year-old son, Quinn. He regularly plays pickup sand volleyball (doubles), even when the temperatures reach triple digits in the Houston summers.