Samuel is a third-year mathematics Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he is advised by Dr. Farzana Nasrin. Samuel previously attended Florida State University (FSU), graduating with a bachelor’s degree in finance in 2015 and a master’s degree in finance in 2016. He since has passed all three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program. Samuel returned to FSU in 2018 and graduated in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. He then moved to Honolulu in the fall of 2020 to begin his doctoral studies. Samuel’s research interests span diverse areas of mathematics and involve a blend of theory, application, and computation. Currently, he focuses on the field of topology which examines properties of shapes and how they react to continuous deformations such as stretching and folding. He seeks to build new statistical and machine learning frameworks for topological objects and use these frameworks to develop practical tools for data analysis. Samuel employs a human-centered approach to data science, carefully considering which parts of research questions and societal issues respond well to quantitative solutions and which should retain a human-to-human connection. He is grateful for the opportunities made possible by the Hawaii Data Science Institute and other sponsoring agencies and is very excited to work with his colleague and mentors to help shape the future of data science.