STEVENS POINT — The second faculty member in the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s data analytics program has been officially installed, the university announced this week.
Kurt Pflughoeft, the Sentry Insurance endowed chairman in computational analytics, brings 20 years of industry experience to the department of computing and new media technologies.
He was chief analytics officer at MaritzCX and head of marketing sciences at Market Probe, according to UWSP. He won corporate innovation awards for solving client problems with advanced data science techniques. He also taught at several universities in Wisconsin and Texas.
A $4 million gift from Sentry Insurance in 2016, the largest in the university’s history, created a new major in data analytics and endowed two new faculty positions. Eduardo Rodriguez joined the School of Business and Economics in fall 2017 as the Sentry Insurance endowed chairman in business analytics, according to UWSP.
The data analytics program features curriculum that integrates the fields of business, computer science, economics, mathematics and statistics. This career field is used in numerous industries, from insurance and health care to finance, marketing, government, information technology and law enforcement.
Rodriguez has extensive experience in analytics, knowledge and risk management in the insurance and banking industry. He previously taught analytics at Telfer School of Management at Ottawa University and at other universities and businesses in Canada, the United States and Columbia.
For more information about this program, see www.uwsp.edu/dataanalytics.
