Derek Hughes

Derek Hughes has a diverse range of work experiences. Derek began their career as a Trainer/Instructor at MindBuilders in 1999. In 2001, they joined Delta Connection Academy, where they served as a Group Manager, FAA Flight Examiner, and Certified Flight Instructor until 2004. During this time, they also worked as an Adjunct Professor at Jacksonville University from January to September 2003.

In 2004, Derek started their own invention company called Hughes Innovations, Inc. As the Business Owner, Entrepreneur, and Inventor, they were responsible for creating the business plan, financial reports, and analytical forms. Derek successfully designed, tested, and produced an invention, the Golf Green SpeedReader. Derek also handled marketing efforts, accounting tasks, and patent and trademark submissions for the company. Derek continued working at Hughes Innovations until 2017.

During their time as a business owner, Derek also pursued other professional opportunities. From 2004 to 2016, they worked as a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimizer while being self-employed. In 2004, Derek also started their career as a Professional Airline Pilot at Comair / Delta, flying for almost 10 years until 2013 when Comair ceased operations. Following this, Derek enrolled full-time at Northwestern University, where they studied software development, data science, and predictive analytics.

From 2014 to 2016, Derek had a role at Northwestern University School of Professional Studies, where they gained experience in various applications and modeling techniques through the Masters program. This included working with R Programming, Java Programming, SAS Programming, IBM/SPSS Modeller, SQL/MySQL, Big Data/Hadoop, Python Programming, and GanttProject, among others.

Most recently, Derek has been working as a Data Science Instructor at Simplilearn since May 2017.

Derek Hughes has a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology and Management from Kennesaw State University, obtained from 1993 to 1998. Derek also holds a Master's Degree in MSIS - Business Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, and Software Development and Management from Northwestern University, which they obtained from 2013 to 2016. In addition to their formal education, Derek has completed several online courses through Ed2go in Information Technology.

Derek has also obtained various certifications, including "Correlation and Regression," "Data Scientist in R," "Data Visualization with ggplot2 (Part 3)," "Exploratory Data Analysis," "Exploratory Data Analysis in R: Case Study," "Foundations of Inference," "Introduction to Data," "Machine Learning Toolbox," "Text Mining: Bag of Words," "Unsupervised Learning in R," "Data Visualization in R," "Data Visualization with ggplot2 (Part 1)," "Data Visualization with ggplot2 (Part 2)," "Joining Data in R with dplyr," "Cleaning Data in R," "Importing & Cleaning Data in R: Case Studies," "Importing Data in R," "Importing Data in R - part 2," and "Writing Functions in R." Some of these certifications were obtained from DataCamp, while the institutions for others are unspecified. The certifications were all obtained in the months of July, August, and September 2017.