Photo

Andrew Zirm, left.Credit Josh Haner/The New York Times

Andrew Zirm, 41, is a data scientist at Greenhouse Software in New York.

Q. What kind of data do you provide at Greenhouse Software?

A. Greenhouse sells a tool that allows companies to interview and recruit job applicants more effectively. I gather and analyze data in several areas, including skills and attributes a person needs to be successful at a certain job. Part of my research involves aggregating data about jobs across industries.

You were an astrophysicist before switching careers. At what age did you become interested in astronomy?

My mom tells the story that when I was 4, I woke my great-grandmother before dawn to show her Venus appearing as the morning star. I got a beginner telescope around the same time.

What was your path to Greenhouse?

I got a Ph.D. in physics in 2003 at Johns Hopkins University and wrote my thesis about astronomy. A series of postdoctoral research fellowships ended with an associate professor position at the University of Copenhagen. In 2014 I served a fellowship at Insight Data Science to learn the skills for working with big data in industry. I met the executives at Greenhouse through Insight.

Why switch to industry?

As an astrophysicist I’d analyze data from the Hubble telescope to study light from distant galaxies. But I wanted to work with data that have an impact in the everyday world — that are more down to earth, so to speak.

What was it like moving from academia to the corporate world?

It’s was a big shift. I still pull numbers from a database, run statistics on them, model them and come up with predictions. But the motivations are different. The speed of analysis has to be faster in business, for one thing. Now my results can affect the company’s bottom line.

Do you miss astrophysics?

I’ll always care about my former field. Astronomy is pure research addressing a unique set of questions such as how the universe formed and how life began. These are fundamental questions about life itself, and we need to devote time to answering them.