Smart Trial and Error for Rapid Innovation

Melisa Buie makes lasers and solves problems. In her role as Director of Operations at Coherent, she works on both engineering and business problems. Buie joined Coherent and began lecturing at San Jose State University in 2007. She has also worked as a Research Scientist for Science Applications International Corporation, working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, where she made theoretical lasers. Buie was a Member of the Technical Staff and Engineering Manager at Applied Materials prior to joining Coherent. Her first book is Problem Solving for New Engineers: What Every Engineering Manager Wants You to Know, which will be published in the summer of 2017. Buie has co-authored more than 40 publications and holds six patents. Her degrees include a PhD in nuclear engineering/plasma physics from the University of Michigan and an MS in physics from Auburn University. She has a Six Sigma Black Belt from the American Society for Quality. Buie will complete a certification program in innovation leadership at Stanford University Graduate School of Business in 2017. She lives in Palo Alto, CA.

Bradley Jones, PhD, is the Distinguished Research Fellow in JMP, where he is responsible for the development of new methods in design of experiments (DOE). He built the JMP Custom Designer, a general and powerful tool for generating optimal experimental designs. He holds a patent on the use of DOE for minimizing registration errors in the manufacture of laminated circuit boards and is the inventor of the prediction profile plot for interactive exploration of multiple input and output response surfaces.

Before joining SAS in 1997, he was the principal statistician at The MathWorks Inc., where he designed and implemented the MATLAB Statistics Toolbox. He was Chief Scientist and a founding partner of Catalyst Inc., a company created to support the use of computer-aided DOE in industry.

Jones is the 2012 recipient of the Statistics in Chemistry award from the American Statistical Association (ASA). In both 2009 and 2011, he received the American Society for Quality’s Brumbaugh Award for the paper making the largest contribution to industrial quality control. He also won the 2010 Lloyd S. Nelson Award for the article having the greatest immediate impact to practitioners. Jones is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Quality Technology and a Fellow of the ASA. He holds a master’s degree in statistics from Florida State University and a PhD in applied economic sciences from the University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Jeff Perkinson is the Director of User Enablement at JMP Statistical Discovery LLC, a SAS company specializing in interactive desktop software for data visualization and analysis.

He began his career supporting the first version of JMP with SAS Tech Support in 1989. Over the past 30 years using JMP, Jeff has gained extensive experience in the areas of predictive modeling, design of experiments, data manipulation and data visualization.

As Director of User Enablement, Jeff is charged with ensuring that every JMP user has the tools they need to get the most out of JMP. In this role, he’s responsible for several customer user support groups including the JMP User Community, Technical Support and Training.

A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Perkinson received Six Sigma Black Belt training at North Carolina State University. Next time you see him, ask Jeff about his time at SouthPeak Interactive, a SAS subsidiary that produced video games.

In his free time Jeff enjoys going to the movies, and eating a meal prepared by a good cook. He doesn’t particularly enjoy running but he does enjoy having gone for a run.