My career path has allowed me to pick up varied skills and expertise, and I currently wear several hats. My full-time job is as a statistician, but in my free time I also analyze and write about soccer and occasionally write popular (aka, non-academic) articles about Korean history.
I received my undergrad from Michigan State in Supply Chain Management (SCM), and a minor in Linguistics. After planning & routing trucks for a year I pursued my PhD in SCM at Iowa State (with extensive coursework in statistics and marketing), before leaving ABD.
After leaving ISU I landed a job as a statistician, where I get paid to essentially do my hobby—collect, analyze, visualize, and report data.
Academic Work
Publications
Chen, H., Genchev, S. E., Willis, G., & Griffis, B. (2019). Returns management employee development: antecedents and outcomes. The International Journal of Logistics Management.
Presentations
Griffis, B., Rose, W.J., & Scheibe, K.P. (2019). Urban Logistics: Drivers and Factors of Strategy Change. Proceedings of the Decision Sciences Institute Annual Conference, 2019.
Other Projects
In my PhD program I was involved in several other projects. One project, “Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Returns Management Capability” (with Chen, H., and Daugherty, P.J.), dealt with introducing the concept of returns management capability and illustrating how previous work in returns management dealt with different capabilities to handle returns that are dimensions of the returns management capability. The methodologies used in this project were a survey (as a new scale, survey validation was needed as well), interviews, and a cluster analysis.
Another project, “A Structure-Conduct-Performance Analysis of Deregulation in the U.S. Craft Brewing Industry” (with Kim, S.K.), attempted to show how deregulating a state’s distribution laws regarding craft breweries was beneficial for both breweries and consumers alike. The methodology for this project was a natural experiment with a difference-in-difference analysis.
A third project, entitled, “Urban Logistics: Drivers and Factors of Strategy Change” (with Rose, W.J., and Scheibe, K.P.), attempted to show how what factors drove firms to start or change their urban logistics strategy, as well as the effect of environmental characteristics on decisions—such as how a firm’s strategy changed in one city compared to another. This involved spatial/temporal analysis using ArcGIS.
Technical/Statistical Skills
Over the years—through classes, research projects, and work—I have learned R and Python for statistical analysis, Python for general coding purposes, Tableau for visualization, and ArcGIS for GIS analysis. I currently work with SAS and am learning that language.
From a methodology standpoint, my PhD program allowed me to take many graduate-level statistics courses and use those methods in research and now my current job. I have solid grounding in statistical theory and training in many types of regression (linear/nonlinear, multiple, logistic), model selection, experiments, time series analysis, and the design/validation/implementation of surveys.
For at least some examples of my Python work, please visit my GitHub page. I created this to post several basic programs for people to use to create different types of soccer visualizations & analyses.
Soccer
I started and run Café Tactiques, a website dedicated to tactics, mainly using data analysis to break down matches with the occasional post on players or managers. I have written Python code to analyze and visualize StatsBomb data, so I often post player analyses or include stat breakdowns in my match analyses.
I also occasionally contribute to K League United, the leading site for English-language coverage of South Korea soccer. Here are my contributions so far:
– Match Analysis: Jeonnam Dragons 0-2 Bucheon FC 1995
–Defensive Woes Help Lift Asan to a 3-0 Win at Jeonnam
–How Seongnam Cut Jeonbuk’s Midfield Passing Lanes in Buildup
–Analyzing Goal Difference Distributions for K League 1 After Round 14
History
I’m also very interested in history, particularly Korean history. I’ve written articles for World History Encyclopedia that focus on different people and topics in the Joseon era of Korean history. I plan on writing more to cover much of the Early Joseon period in detail. Here are my articles so far:
-Taejong of Joseon
–Sejong the Great
–Early Joseon Period
Other Writings
Here’s a collection of my other writings out there so far:
I won third place in the Sejong Cultural Society’s 2022 Sijo competition (a traditional style of Korean poetry). Here is the direct link to my Sijo.
Book Review: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child: An Emotional Depiction of The Mau Mau Uprising and British Rule in Kenya (Published on the website, The Best of Africa).
Ben Griffis 