ADP Research

Tim Decker joined ADP Research in 2021 as a principal data scientist. He is fascinated with quantifying the world and has a knack for seeing problems through a unique lens.

Tim enjoys communicating nuanced concepts with simple analogies and reducing complex systems into bite-sized pieces. He has a track record of solving complex problems.

His career started at a scientific think tank, where he worked on the deterministic chaotic dynamics of extreme weather events, including hurricanes, tsunamis, and droughts. He conducted catastrophic risk analytics, aided forecasting, and constructed algorithms to better understand natural hazards.

Tim later worked at several large companies, including Starbucks Corp. and Facebook, where he collaborated with business partners and deployed data science solutions at scale. He gained experience in operations research, information retrieval, time series analysis, and natural-language processing. He has developed and deployed models utilizing numerical simulations, nonlinear optimization, and neural networks.

Before joining ADP, Tim led the metadata and search team at e-commerce company Zulily, where he re-architected its A/B experimentation platform.

Tim enjoys mentoring junior data scientists and establishing data science best practices. He has a bachelor’s degree in applied computational and mathematical sciences with a focus in economics from the University of Washington.