Biography
Virginia is an expert in analytics, data mining and developing business strategies for data and analytics functions. She has over twenty years’ experience across many industry sectors, including aviation, transport, manufacturing, medicine and futures trading.
Virginia helps businesses solve their problems through the use of analytics and data mining. She is skilled at converting business problems into solvable frameworks, and has the ability then to translate complex concepts into relevant business language and communicate this clearly.
Her particular interest is in data mining and visual analytics, and applying these to her customers’ key business problems.
Virginia has held senior leadership roles for over 10 years and has been very successful in building and developing effective teams, as well as interacting and influencing senior executives / C-suite stakeholders in both the public and private sectors.
In the policy arena, Virginia led Boeing and the aviation industry’s response to proposed carbon and greenhouse gas legislation in Australia. She also successfully engaged with The Boeing Company’s C-suite to communicate the implications for the company and the wider aviation and defence sectors. On policy matters, Virginia has advised on public transport fare reviews, carbon tax and the evaluation of industrial research.
Virginia has prepared expert reports on a range of regulatory, commercial and risk issues, across diverse industry sectors. She has also acted as a statistical expert witness in proceedings involving the relationship between engineering design and the statistical probabilities of certain events occurring. Virginia has built hundreds of successful relationships throughout her career, from government regulators and policy-makers, to universities, media, not-for-profit organisations, senior leaders in corporations and peers in many professional disciplines.
Virginia has particular depth of experience in data visualisation, text data mining and developing new data analysis methodologies that can adapt to each organisation’s unique data. She is a skilled communicator and has been invited to speak at many workshops and conferences, both domestic and international, as well as having given guest lectures at Australian and US universities.
Virginia spent thirteen years of her career with The Boeing Company, where she held the roles of research statistician, Chief Mathematician (Australia), and Director (Boeing Australia Holdings). Prior to joining HoustonKemp, Virginia led the NSW government’s Bureau of Transport Statistics, where she had responsibility for leading a team of over 50 analysts and initiating projects such as visualizing public transaction data, measuring fare evasion and establishing an organisation-wide analytics strategy.
Virginia holds a PhD in data mining (statistics and computer science), a BMath (Honours) from the University of Wollongong, and a GradDip in Epidemiology from University of Newcastle. She has also undertaken postgraduate study in Executive Management at The Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and is currently enrolled in a Graduate Certificate in Change Management at AGSM (UNSW). Virginia also holds a US Patent for an algorithm she designed using ‘black box’ aircraft data to predict future maintenance requirements and hence reduce operating costs for airlines.