Summary
Terry Conlon is a data scientist and technology leader with eight years of experience, currently serving as Co-Founder & CTO at Alia Education and on the Applied Machine Learning team at Maxar Technologies. He holds a PhD from Columbia University where his research in the Sustainable Engineering Lab combined energy system modeling, optimization, geospatial analytics, computer vision, and machine learning to explore transitions in places as diverse as Ethiopia and New York State. Terry’s work blends academic rigor with practical engineering—locating irrigated cropland via computer vision to estimate energy needs and building cost-optimization models for renewable integration and climate planning. Based in New York City, he brings a multidisciplinary perspective that bridges field-scale geospatial insight and systems-level optimization. Beyond conventional ML roles, he has a proven knack for translating complex, data-driven research into operational tech products and startup strategy. More on his projects and reproducible analyses can be found on his personal website.
8 years of coding experience