MEET THE TEAM With Great Data Comes a Great Team

We are a team of mathematicians and software engineers. We work with the world leading data mining experts in universities and empower the art of marketing with the science of data mining and capture the emerging trends in the consumer behavior.

Jannis Mei

CEO

Jannis Mei

Jannis is the CEO of Manifold Data Mining. He has worked on a hundred-million-dollar business transformation and software project at Deloitte Consulting, in discretionary and quantitative investments at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan’s internal hedge fund group, and in quantitative investments at Neuberger Berman. Jannis holds a BASc with Honours in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto and is a CFA charterholder.

Client Associate

Katia Wan

Client Associate

Katia Wan

Katia Wan is a client associate at Manifold Data Mining. She has years of international client-facing experience. She holds a BComm with Honours in International Management from the University of Ottawa.

Arya Sheykhesmaeili

Client Associate

Arya Sheykhesmaeili

Arya is a Client Associate. He has experience as a Data Analyst, consultant, and startup co-founder. Arya holds an Bachelor of Commerce from Queen’s University.

Zhen Mei

President

Dr. Zhen Mei

Dr. Zhen Mei is a leading expert in fusing data sources: location, demographics, spending, health, consumer lifestyle, product and media usage, attitude, and behavioural data. He has over 30 years of experience in applications of data mining to business and commerce. In 2001, Dr. Zhen Mei founded Manifold Data Mining. He has been leading a team of data scientists and software engineers and has served hundreds of clients ranging from Fortune 100 companies to government agencies to not-for-profits to small businesses.

Thomas Ding

Senior Statistician

Thomas Ding

Thomas creates data products at Manifold. He is dedicated to building predictive models to interpolate Dissemination Area (DA) level data and to extrapolate individual/household level data to the 6-digit postal code level. Thomas has over 25 years of experience in data mining. He is constantly experimenting with new data and analytic technologies: from Hadoop and Big Data to machine learning using R, to special techniques for bundling and binning variables in SAS. He holds an MSc in Statistics from the University of Zurich. In his spare time, he likes to dance with mathematical precision.

Jenny Bai

Director of Data Products

Jenny Bai

Jenny is in charge of data product development at Manifold. She has over 25 years of experience in application of data mining to financial industry, ranging from retail banking, credit card marketing and risk management, to loss provision to stress testing and concentration analysis. She provides custom analytic services to our banking and insurance clients in addition to leading our data team. Jenny holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Marburg University, Germany.

Mehrnoush Divsalar

Manager, Back-End Development

Mehrnoush Divsalar

Mehrnoush manages back-end development at Polaris. She designs database structures, optimizes data flows among different components, visualizes data with graphs and charts, and does testing and validation for Polaris. She finds bugs and ensures all features are functioning as designed while recommending improvements. Mehrnoush is skilled in all phases of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and in various webpage development languages such as HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, XAML, JQuery, and AJAX. She holds an MSc in Information and Communication Technology from the Iran University of Science and Technology.

Joseph Zhao

Senior GIS System Integrator

Joseph Zhao

Joseph specializes in developing web applications for GIS. He has over 25 years of experience of applying GIS to business, research, and software development. Using open source GIS systems such as OpenLayers and Leaflet and database management tools like MySQL and PostgreSQL on both Linux and Windows systems, Joseph has been implementing mapping, targeting, and back-end system administration for our online analytics platform: PolarisIntelligence.com. Joseph holds a BSc in Geography from Nanjing University and was a visiting scholar at Aachen University. Joseph has been actively engaged with academic research programs and functions as a research assistant at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University.

Yuanyi Pan

Senior Scientist

Yuanyi Pan

Yuanyi is a Senior Scientist at Polaris. He has 11 years of experience in the advertising technology industry. He has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals. He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics from York University.

Ted Hains

Vice President of Public Health

Ted Hains

Ted has over 30 year of management consultant experience. He has served clients in Canada and the US in diverse industries and settings. Currently he is working on developing and promoting a holistic management eco-system of chronic diseases.

June Tong

Data Scientist

June Tong

June is a specialist in data validation and filling in missing values. In addition to creating reports and running ad-hoc data analysis for clients, she supports the software team with data preparation at all geographic levels. She creates benchmarks and custom reports and is constantly collecting data to refine our data products. June holds an MSc in Computer Science from China’s Northeastern University.

Sebastian Woo

Client Associate

Sebastian Woo

Sebastian Woo is a client associate at Manifold Data Mining. He has years of client-facing experience in technology and strategy consulting. He holds a BA with Honours in Business Technology Management from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Kaitlin Trendel

Content Creator-Writing

Kaitlin Trendel

Kaitlin helps us translate data insights into stories. She is a student at the University of Waterloo.

Parina Dehmeshki

Content Creator-Writing

Parina Dehmeshki

Parina helps us translate data insights into stories. She is a student at McMaster University.