WHO WE ARE

About Us

Who We Are

Meet the Colfax team

The Colfax Communications team includes specialists in all the key areas in which we offer services. We are especially deep and strong in the areas of data science and ad tech, where we offer tremendous bang-for-the-buck.

 

David Galvin

David Galvin

CEO

David Galvin is a veteran of many successful digital-outreach campaigns, some of which have resulted in surprising-to-the-establishment upset victories by the candidates he has worked to support. He brings this same strategic skillset to the advertising-technology realm for private and nonprofit clients. And now, of course, to the innovative area of COVID-19 contact tracing.

Hailing from Colfax, Indiana – the small-town namesake of Colfax Communications – Galvin has traveled to more than 30 countries; served in the U.S. Navy; conducted research on Middle Eastern security issues at the prestigious Department of International Peace and Conflict Resolution at Uppsala Universitet in Sweden; developed an HIV/AIDS testing and treating program in Vijayawada, India; designed the nation’s first municipally owned biofuels program in Kokomo, Indiana; and he has led numerous high-visibility issues-based and political campaigns in Indiana and Florida.

An Emmy Award-winning writer and producer, Galvin takes pride in his record of helping companies, candidates, nonprofits, municipalities and state government agencies solve complex problems by developing and executing creative and comprehensive solutions.  He lives in Indianapolis with his wife and son.

Carlos Orellana

Carlos Orellana

Head of data science

Carlos Orellana graduated with honors from the University of Chile with a degree in physics. He won a Fulbright fellowship for doctoral studies in the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago in 2013. Focusing mostly on experimental material science, he did a postdoctoral stay at Emory University, expanding his research interest into microscopy and the analysis of large quantities of data.

Upon returning to Chile in 2017, he switched focus to industry, where he works on fundamental problems in the iron mining industry. At the same time, he has applied his data-science skills to many areas, including mining and car-predicting models. He has worked for globe-spanning institutions such as the Inter-American Bank of Development.

During his doctoral studies in Chicago, Orellana investigated the flow properties of dense suspensions under the effect of electric and magnetic fields. For his postdoctoral work, he studied the flow of emulsions and colloids in two dimensions. He has given presentations and posters at international conferences and has published in top-rated scientific journals, including Nature.

Jorge Catepillan

Jorge Catepillan

Senior data scientist

Jorge Catepillan holds an industrial engineering degree and a master’s in applied economics from the University of Chile. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University, where his thesis was in game theory and the study of procurement auctions.

After his doctoral studies, Catepillan worked as an advisor under Chile’s secretary of education, focusing mainly on procurement auctions performed at the national level for the acquisition of books and student meals, and providing technical support on the implementation of national educational reform. This experience led to him becoming a consultant for the World Bank, where he provided technical support for the government of Peru, focused mostly on algorithms being brought into use for teacher hiring.

Catepillan’s data-driven procurement-auction analysis efforts in Chile helped to improve a $1 billion annual procurement process, estimating costs with less than 3% error before allocation.

Currently, he works at Colfax Communications as a senior data scientist and at Universidad de Piura as an assistant professor of economics.

Paola Bordon

Paola Bordon

Data scientist

Paola Bordon holds an industrial engineering degree from the University of Chile. She was awarded the Fulbright fellowship for doctoral studies in the United States, obtaining a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin in 2014.

Bordon is an assistant professor at the Economics Department of the University Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile, where she serves as director of the Master in Economics applied to Public Policy program.

Her research fields include economics of education, labor economics, applied econometrics, empirical industrial organization, and public policy. She is a research associate at the Millennium Nucleus for Social Development, as well as an adjunct researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies. She has worked at Chile’s Ministry of Education and as a consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Finance, and the Ministry of Labor in Chile.

Her consulting for the Inter-American Development Bank has included monitoring and evaluation of education reforms in Chile, data analysis and case study of school infrastructure in Chile, as well as assessing the impact of public investments in higher education in Peru.

Her other data analysis endeavors have included estimating the supply and demand of different occupations, improving the efficiency of government procurement, and assessing human capital in data science in the field of astro-informatics.

David Weinstein

David Weinstein

Data scientist

David Weinstein holds an engineering degree in molecular biology from the University of Chile. He received his Ph.D. in biophysical sciences from the University of Chicago.

Weinstein’s undergraduate research was in bacteriology and cell division, studying new potential targets for the development of antibiotics. As a graduate student, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, during which time he performed research into antibody and protein engineering, with a particular focus on developing new inhibitors against oncogenes that foster metastasis during cancer.

He also works as a scientific editor and has edited and translated more than 60 manuscripts, working directly with multiple clients and universities.

Currently, Weinstein is a data scientist focused on data mining and bioinformatics, analyzing large quantities of biological data. When he isn’t working in bioinformatics and statistics of human genomics, he teaches tae kwon do and enjoys reading Egyptian history and interpreting ancient hieroglyphs.