Silver Circle Profiles
A Look at Tom Bradshaw
posted: February 2007When Tom Bradshaw discovered that he couldn't be a pilot or astronaut because he wears glasses, he decided to focus his energies on chemistry and physics. "I loved the problem solving and quantitative solutions," Bradshaw says. "Medical research seemed like a natural application of my talents and interests."
Bradshaw graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in chemistry and a minor in physics and entered the graduate program at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine (formerly the Medical College of Virginia). He planned to become a medical research scientist, until he was introduced to SAS software and began programming and running study data.
"As a toxicologist, I would spend three months injecting thousands of mice, compile the data and then hand the data over to a statistician who would do his SAS magic and tell me if I had significant results," says Bradshaw. "It was so much more fun to be the person who received the data, ran the analyses and then told the researcher if he or she had any significant results."
An introduction to SAS®
In his early days at the medical school, Bradshaw sat down with a shoebox full of punch cards and a SAS 76 manual. Another work-study student had just finished his PhD and entered the work force, so the department needed a new statistician. Bradshaw's adviser handed him the programming cards and told him to learn how to run the programs.
"It was an epiphany," Bradshaw says. "From the beginning, I loved working with SAS. I enjoyed the challenge of putting together a program that would actually run without syntax errors or system abends. I loved using data to do science."
Most of Bradshaw's early programs involved the evaluation of clinical and medical research data. Data was recorded on tally sheets and then sent to the local penitentiary, where inmates key-punched the information. Results were then processed using very early SAS analytic software.
"Sometimes we would be looking at the efficacy of a new drug on some type of cancer. Sometimes it would be the effect of a food additive or environmental pollutant," says Bradshaw. "We did a little of everything, but at the end of the day, the statistics ruled."
Branching out
While Bradshaw was working with medical statistics at the college, some of his friends were launching a furniture company. The company was expanding rapidly, with 60 stores all located in malls. Bradshaw's friends were complaining about all the money they were spending on consultants without getting applicable results.
"They told me the consultants were supposed to help them identify malls where their stores would do well, but they were just getting a lot of confusing mumbo-jumbo," Bradshaw says.
Bradshaw asked his friends to give him the data they had. The next day, he sat down with the mall and demographic data books. A couple of days later, Bradshaw had a SAS program running that predicted sales very accurately.
The president of the furniture company was impressed with the program results but was surprised to learn that Bradshaw was not under contract with his company.
"He had a contract drawn up for me and offered me some furniture (which I declined); so he offered some money (which I accepted)," says Bradshaw. "That was a fun project, because it worked out so well and was the first time I used statistics outside an academic environment."
Leveraging information in the banking world
Bradshaw later shifted to the banking industry, where he worked as a research analyst. He crunched corporate numbers for a while, but it wasn't long before he saw an opportunity to use analytics in a more revolutionary way.
"A consultant made a presentation about targeting for home equity loans, and that is when the light clicked," Bradshaw says. "It occurred to me that marketing was struggling to reinvent the wheel - that is, coming up with techniques to quantify and understand the drivers of customer behavior - stuff that we routinely did in biostatics."
Bradshaw approached his boss and said, "You know I can do a better job." He explained how customer information could be leveraged for stronger marketing strategies, and, as a result, he was soon designing and analyzing direct marketing campaigns.
"Since then, every new job and each promotion has been a direct result of my ability to use SAS to successfully answer increasingly complex business questions," says Bradshaw. "I have used SAS to report, analyze, model and simulate just about everything done in retail banking, racking up hundreds of millions of dollars of documented incremental revenue in the process."
Scoring in the football pool
Though Bradshaw uses SAS primarily as a work tool, he has also used it for fun. When one of his friends set up a complex football pool, Bradshaw won the first week by simply looking over the available information. When he lost the second week, Bradshaw asked the winner how he came up with his picks. The winner said he based his picks on the weekly running statistics.
"It occurred to me that this was really a database modeling problem, so I started cutting and pasting the box scores from the Internet and wrote SAS code to read the data. I built some pretty advanced models to use the offensive stats from team A and the defensive stats from team B to predict how many points team A would score and vice versa. I then compared my predicted spread versus the official predicted spread and ranked accordingly," says Bradshaw.
Bradshaw finished "in the money" for several weeks before his computer-generated picks were banned. It was too hard to play against a well-programmed software application, and the pool participants decided that using the power of SAS was akin to bulking up on steroids.
Today and down the road
Bradshaw now serves as the Senior Vice President at Bank of America, which is among the top five most profitable companies in the world.
"We have an unbelievable amount of data to work with," Bradshaw says. "I just can't believe there is any place with more opportunity or need to use data and good analysis to make a difference."
Bradshaw looks forward to continuing to work at Bank of America and to applying SAS applications to make a difference. He credits his early introduction to SAS software for his career success in a field where he can work with data, find answers and apply solutions.
"The role of SAS in my career is simple. SAS is my career," says Bradshaw. "SAS opened a career path I'd never previously considered and has been my primary resource for analytic computing ever since. I fully expect to continue to use SAS until the day I retire."
