Emmanuel Carrier is a data science consultant in the Operations Research – Data Science group at Delta. Emmanuel received his PhD at MIT under the direction of Peter Belobaba and received honorable mention in the INFORMS George B. Dantzig Best Dissertation Award and first place in the AGIFORS Anna Valicek paper competition.
Emmanuel applied to MIT’s graduate program because he was interested in air transportation and quickly found that his background in math and business were a perfect match for revenue management. “RM is a great mix of applying science to real business problems and knowing that what you are doing can have a real impact on the company’s bottom line.” Emmanuel also enjoys working in RM because there are always new and exciting new problems to work on. “There are so many new data sources and models to look at. Right now, a lot of airlines are looking at how to estimate willingness to pay from their booking data, but this seems to be an elusive problem so far. Also, during COVID, there was renewed interest in seeing how we can better integrate system recommendations with business analysts overrides to these recommendations. There is so much to do in RM, even after I’ve been working in it for 22 years!”
Emmanuel encourages students interested in RM to take a variety of technical courses in revenue management, demand forecasting, and Python and to enhance their communication skills. “Having strong communication skills is very important when you are working on teams and coming up with new ideas for complex systems,” he explains. “At the end of the day, RM systems have business users who are responsible for business metrics, and part of your job will be explaining the work you want to do and convincing business users of the value of your ideas.”
Interested in learning more about Emmanuel? Check out his LinkedIn page. But one interesting fact you won’t find about Emmanuel on his LinkedIn page is that he is from France and since joining Delta in 2011 he has taken more than 450 flights. Some of his favorite places to visit are Hawaii, New York, and Vietnam.