Dan Gifford, '10

As a principal scientist at Getty Images, Dan Gifford, ’10, B.S., physics, leads the company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning team behind Getty’s massive search engine.

But when Gifford explains his job, he references a much more low-tech scenario. It’s like wandering through a pitch-black maze with nothing but a flashlight with a short-lived battery. When do you turn it on? Where do you point it?

“A big part of it is having the right mindset: You’re going to encounter those dead ends and you’re not going to have a 100 percent hit rate. It takes some degree of trust and bravery to say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to try this and then we’re gong to spend money to do it, and we might be wrong.’”

Long before Gifford was immersed in wrangling data for Getty Images, he was a kid in love with space. He picked WWU to study astronomy and ended up working with Physics and Astronomy Professor Ken Rines, who had plenty of astronomical data in need of analysis. “I got to get my hands dirty really fast,” Gifford says.

Rines also helped Gifford build a professional network and land a National Science Foundation fellowship for undergraduate research at the Harvard Smithsonian Center. He went to the University of Michigan to earn a doctorate with plans to continue in astronomical research and academia. But along the way, it seemed to make more sense to move into industry as a data scientist.

“I realized that what I loved about my job was not just the astronomy and physics, which I did love a lot,” he says. “It was really the scientific component of it. How do I take something that I can see, and then estimate something I can’t see? I realized I wouldn’t be sacrificing the stuff that I love to do.”