Faculty Spotlight: Martin Barron
Author: Bryan Fields
Mendoza students bring their passions to Business Analytics
Martin Barron – Teaching Professor for the IT, Analytics and Operations Department
In Martin Barron’s Business Analytics classes at Mendoza, students learn more than just how to work with data. They learn how to take those skills and tackle a wide variety of challenges. And they have fun while doing it.
Barron, assistant teaching professor in IT, Analytics, and Operations, teaches classes including machine learning and sports analytics. Machine learning involves finding key factors surrounding a problem and understanding the relationships in the data to take appropriate action. This allows more accurate predictions, from stock behavior to sports outcomes such as wins and losses. In sports analytics, key factors are identified to optimize athletic and team performance.
Barron emphasizes to his students that what they learn in one area can be applied to other areas when confronting different objectives. During his own master’s program at Notre Dame, Barron analyzed genetic data and discovered firsthand that the skills he used were universal.
“Variation in data works the same way, whether you’re looking at stock prices or RNA data,” he said. “It’s the core skills that I learned in graduate school, and these skills are transferable to other areas. I saw that for myself and now I teach that to my students.” Using topics students find more fun and interesting, such as sports, engages students more and helps them learn more effectively. “You need to be passionate about it to be able to solve problems,” he said. “And at work you don’t always get to choose what types of problems you work on. Students in my classes get to choose their topics so they’re more interested. They’ll often do extra learning and search for solutions themselves because they’re so invested in these issues.”
Barron Guides Students to Success
Barron collaborates with students to guide them through their sports analytics class projects. In one of his latest collaborations, a student baseball manager and head of the ND Sports Analytics Club wanted to create a new metric for pitcher effectiveness. The student identified factors such as number of pitches thrown and innings pitched and combined them into a single score. He used a robust data set from college baseball that covered several years. This kind of metric can not only show how a pitcher’s success is likely to change during the game, but also when he might be at risk of injury.
“I think the next step in baseball analytics will be injury prediction and load management for pitchers,” he said. “We see a lot of the sports analytics world moving in this direction.” The ND baseball team is now benefiting from the new metric. The student gave it to the analytics club, which works with the ND baseball team on scouting reports and analysis of games. The new ND baseball coaching staff is enthusiastic about analytics, and players in class seek the weekly reports to view their performance.
“I’ve seen baseball players in class who are eager to see their reports,” Barron said. He said the new metric may also be shared with the public in the future. A native of Ireland, Barron previously worked as a data scientist at Kitman Labs, a sports analytics company in Dublin. Prior to that, he served as a senior data scientist at the Dublin office of EY Ireland (Ernst & Young). After earning his doctorate at ND and his time at Kitman and EY, he returned to the university and began teaching in 2020. Since then, he has enjoyed his students’ creativity and the passion they bring. “I love seeing what the students come up with,” he said. “I consider the students here brilliant and it’s a pleasure to work with them.”
Learn more about Mendoza’s Business Analytics program and how you can bring your passion for learning.
