Resume

ZACH WILDE

Data and Analytics Professional with an M.S. in Statistics from the University of Utah and a track record of driving seven-figure business impact through predictive analytics, pricing analysis, and executive-facing decision support. Experience translating large-scale pricing, behavioral, and engagement data into actionable business insights across healthcare, telecommunications, and software environments. Comfortable across the full analytics workflow from data extraction and feature engineering to stakeholder communication and operational reporting. Grounded in statistical thinking and experimentation with experience building analytics workflows under noisy, real-world data conditions. Proficient in R, Python, SQL, Excel/VBA, Tableau, and Power BI.

Experience

GBS Benefits

Aug 2024 – Aug 2025
Data Analyst (Statistical Modeling & Pricing Analytics) · Salt Lake City, UT

  • Owned pharmacy claims analytics across 15+ employer client groups, identifying multi-million-dollar savings opportunities through pricing analysis and opportunity-scoring frameworks.
  • Generated $500K–$1M in realized annual business impact through analytics initiatives, with models and workflows projected to 2–3× that figure yearly.
  • Designed pricing and savings-estimation logic under noisy, real-world claims data, improving consistency and stability across highly variable patient populations.
  • Engineered Excel/VBA automation pipelines to reprice hundreds of thousands of pharmacy claims, improving scalability and reducing manual processing time.
  • Built internal decision-support tools for PBM contract comparison and formulary optimization, supporting data-driven benefit strategy and client recommendations.
  • Led backend enhancements in Deerwalk to identify high-cost member populations and prioritize outreach by expected savings impact.

Rain Retail Software

May 2023 – Jan 2024
Data Migration Specialist · Provo, UT

  • Managed data conversion workflows for 100+ retail customers by extracting, validating, and manipulating data using SQL and related tools, ensuring seamless migration to a cloud-based platform.
  • Built strong client trust through effective communication and technical problem-solving, resolving migration issues and owning the end-to-end onboarding process.

Independent Consulting

Jun 2022 – Apr 2023
Data Consultant (Contract) · Orem, UT

  • Built rolling forecasts informing headcount and resource allocation decisions as the sole analyst for a growing clinical organization.
  • Analyzed behavioral health data and delivered client-facing reporting, translating raw operational data into clear narratives that guided leadership decisions on program expansion.

VIVOS

Jun 2022 – Aug 2022
Data Analyst · Orem, UT

  • Applied inferential statistics to 1,000+ patient sleep study records to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of a sleep apnea device, translating statistical significance into actionable recommendations for medical and executive stakeholders.
  • Collaborated with physicians and IT teams to build Power BI reporting and data-driven initiatives, contributing to measurable reductions in employee wait times for data requests and improvements in clinical workflow efficiency.

DISH Network

Jun 2021 – Aug 2021
Operations & Analytics Intern (Customer Behavior & Marketing Analytics) · Denver, CO

  • Conducted an independent behavioral analytics study of 65,000+ subscriber records in R, identifying patterns in Latino market segments that informed $7.3M in enterprise-level marketing decisions.
  • Presented findings to 100+ executives, contributing to a major redesign of DISH’s Latino market web experience.
  • Applied statistical analysis and data storytelling to connect behavioral patterns with business and marketing strategy.

Projects

Predictive Modeling of Social Media Engagement — Master’s Thesis

Apr 2026

  • Constructed a statistical modeling pipeline on ~7,000 TikTok videos with 40+ engineered features spanning temporal, linguistic, visual, and engagement dimensions.
  • Designed nonlinear regression frameworks accounting for heavy-tailed engagement distributions and temporal effects in social media data (log and polynomial structures).
  • Benchmarked OLS, Ridge, and Lasso via repeated train/test splits; demonstrated that Lasso’s automated feature selection (47 → 40 features) matched full-model accuracy with a leaner, more interpretable specification.
  • Key finding: domain-driven feature engineering and temporal specification mattered more than model architecture in explaining engagement variance.

Multimodal Video Feature Extraction Pipeline

Mar 2026

  • Built a full data pipeline from scratch converting raw TikTok video URLs into structured, model-ready datasets using Whisper (audio transcription), Tesseract OCR (on-screen text), and OpenCV (visual frame analysis).
  • Bridged unstructured video content and statistical modeling designed for repeatability and scalability across workflows.

Education

University of Utah

Apr 2026
M.S. Statistics · Salt Lake City, UT

  • Thesis: Predictive modeling of TikTok engagement via multimodal feature engineering and regularized regression.
  • Coursework: Linear Models, Time Series, Computational Statistics, Mathematical Statistics, Graduate R & Python

Utah Valley University

May 2022
B.S. Statistics · Orem, UT

  • Research: Bankruptcy prediction models for U.S. restaurant firms

Leadership

President & Founder — Sports Analytics Club, University of Utah

  • Founded and led a university organization focused on applied sports analytics, collaborative modeling projects, and technical presentations.

Graduate Instructor — Applied Statistics I, University of Utah

  • Taught undergraduate statistics and R programming to 60+ students, translating statistical concepts into practical analytical reasoning.

Technical Skills

PROGRAMMING
R (tidyverse, glmnet), Python (pandas, NumPy, scikit-learn), SQL, Advanced Excel/VBA

ANALYTICS & MODELING
Regression, Forecasting, A/B Testing, Cross-Validation, Feature Engineering, Predictive Modeling, Time Series Analysis

DATA PROCESSING
APIs, Web Scraping, OCR (Tesseract), OpenCV, Whisper, ETL Workflows, Data Cleaning and Transformation

COMMUNICATION
Executive-Level Presentations (100+ Stakeholders), Technical Storytelling, University Instruction in Applied Statistics, Cross-Functional Collaboration

TOOLS
Tableau, Power BI, Google Looker, GitHub

LANGUAGES
English (native), Spanish (professional proficiency)