From troubleshooting MRI analysis at Vanderbilt to steering Shopify’s data strategy, Andrew Plassard (PhD ’17) shows how Vanderbilt‑grown curiosity ignites industry‑scale AI.

GPU budgets hint at the scope of his work: “We tend to light a good amount of GPU on fire in any given month, and there’s a constant struggle of saying, okay, how many GPUs do we need this month?” Efficiency increasingly comes from innovative models, such as Meta’s event‑based Hierarchical Sequential Transformer Units, which let his team convert clickstreams into tailored onboarding tips without weeks of feature engineering. Generative tools remove roadblocks too: “I no longer need to write SQL, for the most part, in my day‑to‑day life.”

Eight years in tech have clarified what turns insight into impact. “Having the best idea doesn’t matter… if you’re not able to present that and market it,” Andrew says. Today, success means translating ideas into production‑ready code: “Good general data work has gone from this research science‑y first mentality to engineering problems,” where progress depends on “writing really, really crisp and good code.”

AI’s reach keeps widening. Andrew keeps a browser tab open to Shopify’s internal AI hub: “I have every LLM imaginable available to me,” he notes. Those models power quick experiments—querying databases through natural language and launching prototypes in hours. And the workflow is only getting smarter: “Agentic workflows are great… being able to see a problem and… structure a basic prompt to a solution has been really transformative.”

That kind of judgment—knowing what matters in a sea of data—was something Andrew first practiced at Vanderbilt. “I brought some numbers into your [Landman’s] office,” he recalls, “and you said: do these numbers make sense?” Andrew needed to check them against a broader population. That lesson stuck. “So much of good problem solving is being able to bring in the right context… to better frame a discussion.” It was part of a culture where “we were in such a collaborative environment that we were able to see work from different areas—computer science, electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, physics, psychology—and get all these ideas.” Whether parsing MRIs or sifting billions of shopping‑cart events, that curiosity remains Andrew’s most scalable asset.

Looking back, Andrew says he still misses walking Vanderbilt’s campus and the energy of being surrounded by people doing passionate, interdisciplinary work. “You never remember the downs,” he reflects, “just the time you spent working on really weird problems you wouldn’t have expected.”