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Virtual Event
 

Information:

Date: June 23, 2024

Time: 8pm - 9:15pm EST

Fee: Free!

Description: This event took place online and gave students the opportunity to hear from Sonia Raman, the first Indian-American woman to be an assistant coach in the NBA, participate in a case study run by Scott Powers, an Assistant Professor of Sports Analytics and Statistics at Rice University and former Assistant General Manager of the Houston Astros, and receive educational and career guidance from both. Please see full bios of Sonia Raman and Scott Powers below.

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Agenda:

8 - 8:05             Introduction

8:05 - 8:15        Talk with Sonia Raman

8:15 - 8:35        Q&A with Sonia Raman

8:35 - 8:55        Case Study with Scott Powers

8:55 - 9:05        Career Guidance from Scott Powers

9:05 - 9:15        Q&A with Scott Powers​

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Bios of the Featured Speaker:

Sonia Raman is the first Indian-American woman to be an assistant coach in the NBA. She was also a longtime head coach of the MIT women's basketball team.

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Sonia Raman recently completed her 4th season as an Assistant Coach with the Memphis Grizzlies. During that time, the Grizzlies finished as high as the second seed in the regular season in 2022 and 2023 and made the NBA Playoffs in three seasons. In addition, Raman has been a speaker at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference and the Women in Sports Data Conference. Raman is the first Indian American woman to serve as an NBA Assistant Coach. Raman previously served 12 seasons (2008-20) as the Head Women’s Basketball Coach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she led the Engineers to the program’s first two New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) championships (2018, 2019) and the 2020 championship game. MIT enjoyed unprecedented success under Raman, whose tenure produced two NCAA Tournament berths and a 91-45 record (.669) over her final five seasons. Raman was also an Assistant Director of NCAA Compliance for the largest Division III Athletics program in the nation (33 sports).Prior to her arrival in Cambridge, Raman served six seasons (2002-08) as an Assistant Coach at Wellesley College. Raman began her intercollegiate coaching career with a two-year stint as an Assistant Coach ather alma mater, Tufts University. A four-year player and a captain for the Jumbos, she graduated in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations. Raman went on to receive a Juris Doctor fromBoston College Law School in 2001.​​​​​​​​​

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Scott Powers is a professor of Sports Analytics and Statistics at Rice University.

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Scott Powers is an Assistant Professor of Sport Analytics and of Statistics at Rice University. Much of his work involves what team front offices want to know: (a) how to measure individual contributions to team success in team sports and (b) how to squeeze optimal estimates of player talent from limited data. Building on these results, Scott researches what league offices want to know: how teams and players respond to incentives, from a game theoretic perspective. Scott wants to understand how leagues can design these incentives to promote the health of their sport. 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's favorite sports are baseball, soccer and volleyball.

​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 before joining Rice in 2023. Along the way, Scott held multiple-year consulting engagements with the Oakland Athletics (baseball), AZ Alkmaar (soccer) and Zelus Analytics (baseball and soccer).

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