User:Gchavez11/sandbox

Background
Irene Tsapara is from Patras, Greece and came to the United States and attended the University of Illinois in 1989. Tsapara been across the United States and Europe teaching in universities over 20 years. She is fluent both in English and Greek while also has knowledge of French and Spanish.

Education
Tsapara acquired a bachelor’s in mathematics from University of Patras in 1988. She also obtained a master’s in predictive analytics and data science at Northwestern University in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) focused in machine learning and artificial intelligence from the University of Illinois in 1997, with a thesis on the learnability of atomic formulas.

Experience and Research
Tsapara conducted research with learning analytics, e-learning platform analytics, financial risk analysis and applied machine learning, and she has worked in the financial industry as a financial engineer. Her job consisted of building financial algorithms for trading systems at Goldman Sachs/Hull Trading for two years. She worked as an investment analyst for Hedge Fund Research INC for 3 years.

Tsapara is professor in statistical and data analysis, machine learning, computer science and curriculum development at the University of Illinois at Chicago since. In addition, She is a private consultant, data engineer in the Chicago area.

Awards and Recognitions
Tsapara won the HOPE (Honor of the Outstanding Progressive Educator) teaching Award in 2018. This award is given for outstanding teaching and concern for students. This award is significant because it recognizes her ability to teach and the quality of a professor that she is.