Stanford
Engineering
Spotlight

Daniel Lopez

MS ’09, Management Science and Engineering
I recently attended the inauguration of new Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Tessier-Lavigne’s closing statement was, ‘Let us be fearless.’ This quote aligns with how I think about my work as an engineer.

#IAmAnEngineer and I want to be fearless in being the best person that I can be, and providing the best quality information to people that enable us to make better decisions.

I was born and raised in Mexico. I worked at a big Fortune 500 company in Mexico City doing data analytics and risk management. My background was in economics, but my dream was to attend a top-tier university in the United States for my master’s degree. I looked at the Management Science & Engineering program at Stanford, and I knew right away that the combination of economics and engineering was perfect for me. After graduating, I interned at a Bay Area pharmaceutical company called Biocodex. It was a tough time to find a job, because of the recession following the financial crisis in ’08. But the learnings I gained from the MS&E program enabled me to grow from intern to department head, building their data science and analytics department. Our team works across finance, logistics, marketing, sales and HR functions. Our objective is to get the best quality information possible to executive management. That way, we can make better decisions.

One of my most valuable takeaways in this work, and from the MS&E program, is that the quality of our decisions is not determined by the outcome, but by the quality of the information you have up front.

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