Andres Moreno

The story of my life is a sequence of vignettes that reflect my various interests, with more or less focus on one thing or another without ever totally giving up on anything. Novels, algorithms, theorem proofs, software, running, and cycling have all been passions of mine.

Education & Academic Career

I attended the University of Minnesota as an undergraduate and received a degree in Mathematics. Afte working a couple of software jobs, I returned to the graduate school and ended up taking all the coursework for a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus on automata theory, algorithms, and complexity theory. Despite my interest in some of these areas, I slowly realised that I didn’t want to be a computer science academic.

While figuring out what to do next I enrolled in Spanish literature courses–I felt that I was losing some of my fluency, especially when it came to writing. I really enjoyed these classes, especially one on Don Quijote. The faculty of the department encouraged me to consider graduate study in literature which led to my obtaining an M.A. and a Ph.D in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Literatures with an focus on medieval authorship.

I landed a tenure-track position at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN in the Modern and Classical Languages department. I enjoyed teaching Spanish language and literature classes, as well as a writing-intensive course for First Year students (in English). The life at a small Catholic university was not for me, so I left for a career in industry.

Marketing Research

Happenstance led me to a position as Analytics Account Executive on the General Mills account. I worked with the Nielsen account team to deliver studies on pricing, assortment, and segmentation.

Shortly after arriving at Nielsen, I realised that I had greater advancement opportunities in the Retail division with their professional services group in an area that was more closely aligned with my interest in software. While in this role, I leveraged for Nielsen’s retail clients software infrastructure that had been developed for manufacturing clients to deliver an automated software solution at scale for major retailers (SUPERVALU, Meijer, Walgreens, Kroger, and Target).

Next, I returned to the analytics group as a Director and worked on solutions for retailers, delivering price elasticities at scale. I also managed the entire Nielsen portfolio of Advanced Analytics at a mid-tier manufacturer, delivering an integrated process of sales and shipment forecast, marketing budget allocation, marketing mix, and price/promotion analysis and simulation.

I left Nielsen in 2009 to wok at EYC to lead the Analytics group on the SUPERVALU business (loyalty analytics of major retail banners, including Albertsons).

EYC became insolvent in 2010, so I returned to Nielsen to head the Analytics team for Nielsen at Walmart. In this role I directed the research for the pitch that resulted in Nielsen winning the business (and the largest contract ever with a retailer). I stayed on the Walmart business for a year and them moved to Nielsen’s Big Data group as a Transformation Leader. In this role I advised Nielsen analytics management on large scale needs for retailers, mainly in the areas of pricing, promotion, and assortment. I took a break from this role to look after family matters but returned to the same group as Principal Architect.