Aster Santana

Hello!

My name is Asteroide Santana, but people typically call me Aster.

Many people wonder where my name came from. If you’re curious, I’ve created a page only to explain it.

Currently, I live on the beautiful island of Florianópolis (see it on Wikipedia), which is located in the south of Brazil and is only one hour driving away from my birth town, Garopaba.

From 2014 through 2020 I lived in Atlanta, United States. I moved to Atlanta with my wife, Denise, to do a Ph.D. in Operations Research at Georgia Tech. In addition to my Ph.D. degree, Denise and I had two daughters (Sophia and Luisa), we made many special friends, I got my first job as an applied scientist, and I found my passion for solving real-world problems with advanced analytics.

Academic Journey

My academic journey started with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics, 2005-2009, and a Master of Science in Mathematics & Scientific Computing, 2011-2013, both from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), in Brazil.

In between, I spent a few semesters teaching courses such as calculus and linear algebra to various undergraduate engineering programs at UFSC. But that was a temporary lecturing position. If I wanted to become a faculty there, which I wanted at the time, I would need a Ph.D. degree.

Among a few options I had, I chose to apply only for the program in Operations Research from the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) at Georgia Tech. I started the program in August of 2014 and received my Ph.D. degree in May 2019.

Throughout the program, in addition to publishing five papers in top peer-reviewed scientific journals, I learned how to solve real-world problems using a variety of methodologies and technologies. Mathematical Optimization was by far my favorite one, which I had the pleasure to teach a few times to undergrad students.

The second time I was an instructor for the Engineering Optimization course, I even got the honor to teach it with Prof. George Nemhauser, one of the pioneers in the development of mixed-integer programming and its applications.

The same year, I was the recipient of the Graduate Student Instructor of the Year award at ISyE. Which gave me extra confidence that teaching was one way I could make impacting contributions.

Finally, I used to be actively engaged with the Georgia Tech community by organizing seminars, giving talks, and advising undergrad students. For a few years, I was also a fellow coach in the Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) program, at Georgia Tech.

Industry Journey

I started off my career in the industry with a summer internship at Opex Analytics in 2018. I wrote a blog at the time describing the amazing experience I had.

In 2019, I turned away an offer from Amazon and rejoined Opex Analytics, this time as a full-time consultant. In the months that followed, I worked on several exciting projects.

In particular, I became an expert in inventory optimization under the supervision of Sarang Jagdale and Larry Snyder, who was a research associate at Opex at the time. That project led me to develop my first enterprise-grade software solution, which I helped to deploy to a client one year later.

Also under the supervision of Sarang Jagdale, I developed a comprehensive production planning and scheduling solution that drove significant attention inside Opex, and later in Llamasoft as well.

At the end of 2019, Opex got acquired by Llamasoft. The unexpected event opened up new possibilities for me. I got promoted to Solution Architect and got exposed to a whole range of new applications, including a very challenging network design problem that I managed to solve with a custom decomposition for a major multinational logistics company.

I was already back in Brazil in 2020 when Llamasoft got acquired by Coupa. That was another surprise that came with new opportunities for me. In addition to being promoted to Sr. Solution Architect, got the opportunity to interact with new professionals and new clients.

In particular, I learned a lot more about inventory optimization when I helped to deploy the solution I had previously developed to a global electrical appliance manufacturer. Even before that project was finished, I got assigned to another project to develop a solution to a complex transportation optimization problem, this time for one of the largest logistics companies in the world.

These were intensive 2.5 years that felt more like a decade of work to me, especially if I think about how much experience I gained. Nevertheless, there were plenty of opportunities for me to continue to grow inside Coupa. However, in July 2021, I felt a strong call from deep inside me. The call was to start executing on a vision that I had been growing for many years, part of which got materialized with Mip Wise.