Boris Kushnarev

Boris obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Aerospace Engineering from Baltic State Technical University in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Then, he defended his Master’s Thesis at San Diego State University in Mechanical Engineering at San Diego State University in California. His work was based on mathematical and numerical modelling of sintering processes of metals and ceramics. Completing his Thesis Boris was involved in intensive research that incorporated data analysis of numerical and mathematical modelling of sintering with the further comparison of the obtained data with the physical processes of the abovementioned physical process.

After graduation, he returned to his hometown Almaty in Kazakhstan where he started to work in a construction company as a project manager. One of his duty was to prepare reports and analyses, for instance, of the monetary expenses and material usage, convey this information to stockholders and clients. On the other hand, he had to travel extensively to control the construction sites, and they could be in the middle of nowhere. After 10 years of experience in construction, he thought about transitioning to the data related industry.

To fulfil his new goals, he started to take online courses related to data. He took his first course named Programming for Data Analysis at Udacity where he learned Python, SQL and some Tableau. Boris’ second course was Data analysis with an emphasis on statistics, data wrangling and of course data analysis. He also was accepted at the PyTorch Scholarship Challenge and completed it successfully. Finally, working hard towards his dream, he found a job as a Data Scientist at Halyk bank; furthermore, this is one of the biggest banks in Kazakhstan. Later he was invited to the local branch of Sberbank and became a Middle Data Scientist.

Boris and his family have had plans to move to Australia, so he found an opportunity to apply to the Data School Down Under. He successfully passed his first interview online then upon his arrival in Australia, he held his second interview and was accepted into the program.

In his spare time, Boris likes to travel with his family and he has visited France, Russia, Italy, Israel, the US, Netherlands and Australia. He is eager to visit more countries after the pandemia is over. He enjoys eating traditional Russian and Kazakhstan dishes like pelmeni or plov and likes to try cuisines from different countries.