cades Consulting LAB

CADES Lab Manager:  Adam Macbale

Lab's Faculty Overseers: Daniel Taylor-Rodriguez, Bruno Jedynak

Consulting projects will be undertaken by dedicated graduate students under the supervision of the CADES Lab Manager, the Faculty Overseers, and one or more members of RTG faculty (listed here).  Additionally, the CADES Lab also offers avenues for projects to be entirely handled by faculty members, if so desired. 

The current consulting topics reflect the expertise of the students and the faculty involved. A wide range of fields are covered, including, but not limited to, optimization, statistical learning, finite element modeling, Monte Carlo methods, inverse problems, experimental design, sampling methods, estimation, linear and non-linear regression methods. Additionally, the lab organizes seminars, workshops and training events, covering quantitative methods and software of interest to researchers and professionals across the life, social, physical, health, and engineering sciences. 

The training goal of the lab is to provide a unique opportunity for students of all levels to work alongside faculty, solving real-world problems, with top-to-bottom integration of university resources and expertise. 

FOR CLIENTS:

The CADES Consulting Lab offers a host of services to prospective clients and researchers. These services include:

• Free 1-hour consultation for every project / client

• Free consulting service for all projects taken on by students in the Consulting Rotation

• Professional, faculty-led consulting services

• Seminars and workshops on quantitative methods and programming

• Quantitative coding services

• Grant writing and grant funded work 

If you'd like to make a payment on an existing invoice with the Lab, please use our online payment portal via the button below

FOR STUDENTS:

The CADES Consulting Lab is centered around two main courses, recommended but not required to be, taken in sequence. First is the 10-week course on Basic (data driven) Consulting Skills offered in the Fall at 400/500 level. These skills include fundamental skills, like how to vet a project; how to ask pertinent piercing questions; how to present and report findings to clients; basic programming concepts and good coding habits; data visualization and parallel computing; exploratory data analysis, data cleaning best practices, basics of modeling, etc. Students will start the term with a project that involves data. The data set will not be another toy dataset contrived for academic exposition, but rather one that is messy, incomplete, and opaque. Students will continually work on these projects as they develop their skills over the term.

In the second portion of the sequence, students will take part in the Consulting Rotation, where they will be able to choose from several client-initiated projects to undertake over one or two terms. Projects are initiated with an hour-long consultation where groups of two students meet with a client to better understand their data science needs, gaining practice on the client-consultant interaction. After an in-class discussion of weekly cases, student groups will meet their respective clients again to provide advice on potential solutions. Students will choose one among their client-initiated projects to fully develop a solution. Solutions generated here will be of actual impact and value to real clients with real problems. The process provides vital experience to the students as well as valuable resolution to clients. 

CONSULTATION SCHEDULE