Jacob Anderson

I received my B.S. in physics from Brigham Young University where I was an active member of our SPS chapter and a member of Sigma Pi Sigma. During my senior year I was selected as a member of the chapter leadership where I coordinated our education and outreach program to local schools. After graduating from BYU, I attended graduate school at the University of Maryland, where I received my Ph.D. As a graduate student, I gave public and private tours of the SLAC National Laboratory. Upon receiving my Ph.D., I began working at Fermilab as a post-doctoral physicist on the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC. I had the exciting opportunity to be part of the collaboration which co-discovered the Higgs Boson in 2012 and was involved in the search for and even measurement of other exotic phenomena.

After leaving academia in 2014, I became a Research and Data scientist at Pearson where I worked on better implementation and use of educational technology, eventually becoming a Director of Data Science. I am currently a Lead Research Engineer at Here Technologies, working on automated map production research to improve maps in support of highly automated and autonomous vehicles.

SPS Alumni Information

SPS Chapter: Brigham Young University

Jacob Anderson is available for student engagement in the following categories: mentoring, in-person speaker, virtual speaker. Send a request using this form .

Alum Location: Boulder, Colorado
Education Level: PhD
Disciplines: particle, computational, nuclear, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics

Job Sector: industry
Recent position: Research Manager, Here Technologies
Job Description: As a Lead Research Engineer, I lead and manage a small team of researchers and software engineers who are working on using heterogeneous sensor data to build a high quality map that can be used to support autonomous driving functions. This is a hard problem that has the potential to reshape transportation in the future. I use a lot of the skills that I learned during my physics education including using data to make inferences about the world, understanding of sensors and data acquisition systems, vehicle dynamics and the laws of motion, working in collaborative teams to produce a unified result and many others.