JOE WALL, PhD – CEO
Joe had dreams of making the world a better place. After graduating college, Wall Street used his meager programming skills to show him how to make money and squashed those dreams. But, if you wait 15 years, it turns out that the world changes and let’s face it, Joe will always be a nerd. So, Joe embraced his inner nerd and tried again. He sharpened up his analytics skills and caught some frauds along the way. We’re not sure how (maybe he used his mad fraud skills to do it), but someone at Case Western University messed up bad and gave him a Ph.D. People seem to think he’s some kind of expert in data forensics, analytics, and applied disruptive technologies. But if you get to know him, he’s really just that same nerd trying to make the world better somehow. Long story short: we took pity on him and let him play with the cool kids for once (shhh… don’t tell him. He thinks we are all nerds too).
TOM GROLEAU, PhD – COO
As a child, Tom scoured record store discount bins looking for Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and other great jazz artists. Even though he came of age during height of the disco movement, his number one goal was to play drums in a big band jazz ensemble. As he got older, music was still a passion, but he knew that it was a hard way to make a living. In college, he decided to take calculus and economics along with music theory. Halfway through his freshmen year, he met the Chair of the math department during a campus blood drive. The Chair was quite excited to hear about Tom’s calculus studies and by the time Tom finished his blood donation, the Chair was his new advisor and mathematics was his new major. After college he taught math and computer science at a high school in Central Wisconsin before moving to Kentucky to become a COBOL programmer (for the record, Y2K was partly his fault). Then he went back to school for an MS and PhD from the University of Kentucky. Since then, Tom has held faculty and administrative roles at institutions in three different states, spending much of his time thinking about how to use data wisely and how to teach others to use data wisely. He is currently a business analytics professor and program director at a large university with a great basketball team.
KEVIN RICH, PhD – CFO
Kevin brings 20+ years of experience in public accounting and higher education and is always looking for ways to use data to get an advantage. He spent a lot of his industry days combing through datasets to identify inefficiencies and catch fraud, and became the “techie guy” of his group when he wrote a script that turned a 10-hour monthly task into a 5-minute exercise. He continues to walk a fine line between accounting and information systems in his academic career and takes great joy in exploring the latest technology tools used in industry. Kevin insists that he is cooler than the rest of the team and surely not a nerd despite his closet full of Star Wars figures (every single original one) and baseball cards. He also enjoys living in the past as he obsesses over Notre Dame Football every Saturday in the Fall.
JESSICA OGILVIE, PhD – CMO
Born with a love of numbers (and curiosity to boot), Jess grew from a proud mathlete during her primary school days to a finance and economics major in college. During that time she became increasingly passionate about sharing her love of data and all the possibilities surrounding it. With a PhD in Marketing she has now worked for years to help individuals and companies leverage the insights hiding right below the surface of their businesses. Driving insight and connecting innovation to possibility is what gets Jess out of bed in the morning – though having three dogs doesn’t hurt the cause either! Jess brings over ten years of marketing and sales experience to the CitizenDS team with expertise in marketing and sales force strategy. She has previously worked as a professor, marketing strategy and frontline consultant, and sales force trainer and coach. Her experience has taken her around the world working closely with sales leaders in small companies and startups as well as sales talent and marketing leadership in global Fortune 500 companies. As the CMO of CitizenDS, she aims to unlock the passion and possibility of data science for all. As the CMO of CitizenDS, she aims to unlock the passion and possibility of data science for all.