About
Adam Copeland is a PhD-trained quantitative researcher who sells, builds, and plays golf, roughly in that order of how most people meet him.
As Academic Account Manager at Wolfram Research, he owns a multi-state territory of over 100 university and institutional accounts representing more than $1M in active annual recurring revenue, running the full sales cycle from demand generation through multi-year contract negotiation and renewal. Before that, he spent four years teaching and researching at the University of Michigan and Augusta University, culminating in a PhD in Sport Management focused on how sports leagues write and rewrite their rules.
That research is not academic decoration. His dissertation applied NLP and computational text analysis, including word embeddings and zero-inflated negative binomial and mixed-effects logistic regression, to a corpus of over 10,000 NFL rules. That work grew into the Rules of Sport Database, an ongoing project that has since parsed hundreds of rule book editions across a dozen sports into one structured, full-text-searchable database.
Outside of work, Adam builds. He has built a golf shot tracker with a Broadie-style strokes-gained engine (Vesper, with BLE sensor decoding still an active track) and a voice-first AI golf caddy for iOS (Hesper, a working prototype running on his own phone). He also runs a local data pipeline for his own WHOOP band's recovery, strain, and sleep scoring, and maintains a meal-planning web app his household uses every week. He is an avid golfer and a former Five Iron Golf attendant in Detroit, with hands-on knowledge of golf simulator technology, course operations, and the golf-tech landscape.
The throughline: find the number that matters, explain it in plain language, and build or sell whatever gets it into someone's hands.
What I bring
Sales and Account Management
Full sales cycle management, from demand generation through close and renewal; multi-year contract negotiation; stakeholder and client relationship management across procurement, faculty, and administrative audiences; territory and account prioritization from usage data; product-to-need mapping.
Quantitative and Statistics
Regression and predictive modeling; zero-inflated negative binomial and mixed-effects logistic regression; panel and longitudinal data analysis; experimental design; A/B testing; hypothesis testing.
NLP and Machine Learning
Word embeddings (word2vec, GloVe) built and analyzed in Python; large-scale text corpus analysis; computational literature review methods.
Programming and Tools
Python (gensim, spaCy, NLTK), R, Mathematica/Wolfram Language, advanced Excel. Also builds full applications through self-directed projects: TypeScript/React Native, Swift/SwiftUI, SQL/SQLite (including FTS5 full-text search, built into the Rules Database), and Docker.
Domain: Golf and Sports
Deep golf-industry knowledge from hands-on venue and simulator experience at Five Iron Golf; applied personal golf analytics using TrackMan data and strokes gained; and sport-management research spanning the NFL, NCAA, and other governing bodies.
Next role
Detroit-based, open to remote. Targeting roles in golf technology (sales and account management), account management more broadly, sports analytics, data, and AI/EdTech, where research rigor, a builder's instinct, and genuine golf-industry knowledge are assets rather than nice-to-haves.