The places YOUR UM graduate education will take you: An alumnus uses her expertise at Bud Lab

hoto credit to Research Park at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

University of Mississippi students and Anheuser-Busch products have been acquainted with each other for many years. One alumnus has been making a name for herself with Anheuser-Busch InBev. Tina Gui graduated from the University of Mississippi with a M.S. in Computer and Information Science in 2014. After she started working towards her Ph.D., an Anheuser-Busch recruiter contacted her through LinkedIn about a position at a research lab known as the InBev Bud Lab.

The Bud Lab was founded in 2013 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The lab focuses on analytics and develops innovative approaches to solve complicated data research problems, from social media to market trends and larger data initiatives. Gui was offered a position at the lab to work in research development related to key company products.

“For BudLab, the focus is trying to help Anheuser-Busch grow as a global business where we face different challenges day to day,” said Gui. “We bring cutting edge technology to help solve problems from all around the world with Anheuser-Busch.”

She started as a computer scientist with Anheuser-Busch while she was studying Bioinformatics for her doctoral degree at the University of Mississippi. (By the time of this interview, she had completed her doctoral defense and nearly finalized her dissertation.) When asked about her time in Oxford, she explained how her courses left her feeling sufficiently prepared to take on multiple roles such as data scientist, software engineer, and algorithm developer. She was ready for an opportunity to showcase her abilities and felt equipped for the job at hand.

“The skills and knowledge I learned through UM courses like critical thinking, conducting research methods, actually helped a lot in preparing me for getting my first job.”

With her first role as computer scientist at Anheuser-Busch, Gui led two junior data analysts in building the friendly user interface for the Anheuser marketing team to be able to understand pricing and promotion elasticities.

In 2019, Gui moved east from the Bud Lab at the University of Illinois to the lab located at MIT. She is currently working in a more leadership-based role as a manager of analytics. Now, Gui oversees different short- and long-term projects while working with MIT professors and is an individual contributor to other projects as well. There are challenges when Gui collaborates with different parties outside of Anheuser-Busch.

“The hard part is sometimes getting people up to speed with our day-to-day programing tools as they may not be familiar with the platform we use for projects, big data, or doing data analysis. It requires a lot of training beforehand to understand the platforms, so the challenge is using different tools and figuring out how to make collaborations more efficient.”

Continuing the discussion on challenges with work over the last year, Covid-19 was one that came up frequently. Most of the workers from Anheuser-Busch have been working remotely since last March, and many are waiting for everything to return to normal before in-person work can resume.

“From all around the world with Anheuser-Busch, we have the chance to learn from other markets from China to Brazil. We get to use different strategies for different markets. We work with the stakeholders, VPs, and senior directors, and understanding the challenges … well, especially over the last year with Covid,” is a key part of the current work.

There are different opportunities to help the marketing team decide what new products are developed, where to launch, and pricing those products. Some examples are special product releases in certain cities and working closely with personnel to give the best product possible.

At the BudLab, the opportunity for fun is always around to keep the morale high through the workdays. Beer after 4:30 pm is common practice with the BudLab team, and coolers with employees’ favorite beer are filled monthly by the company itself.

“For meetings after 4:30 we have sort of like a happy hour where we can have coolers and every month they restock, and you can have your favorite beer ordered.”

The chemistry with lab employees is abundant, and the groundbreaking work is impressive. There is no doubt Gui will continue to do remarkable work with the company and she is proof that you never know where your graduate degree from the University of Mississippi will take you.

Gui quotes are in bold.

The places YOUR UM graduate education will take you: An alumnus uses her expertise at Bud Lab

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