IMG-5899.JPG

Hi!

My name is Ahsan. I am originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh. I moved to the United States in 2008 to attend college (US) / university (Everywhere else) and have lived here since.

I have had many careers and lives in many parts of the world. Currently, I lead the Strategic Pricing team at a Silicon Valley startup, Druva Inc.

Before joining Druva, I served as a strategy consultant at the Silicon Valley offices of Simon-Kucher & Partners, a global Marketing and Strategy firm broadly recognized for a specialization in pricing. I brought a long-term love of science and technology into the job, focusing on assisting software and hardware technology companies with pricing, marketing and sales strategy.

Since you’re still reading, I’ll tell you more things about me, why not. Prior to consulting, I obtained a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University, where I worked under the supervision of Dr. Aaron Dollar at the Yale GRABLab (Department of Mechanical Engineering and Material Science). My dissertation was in the design of reconfigurable robots constructed from many simple robotic 'cells', leveraging shape and stiffness-change to create robotic mechanisms. This stuff was super interesting, all this shape-changing robots and stiffness-modulating electronics. It became my dissertation almost by default — my adviser had this interesting idea, no real examples of other people having answered this interesting question, and my slogging away at all sorts of dumb ways of answering this interesting and hard question from all sorts of angles. A bit like a bull charges at an annoying waving flag now and then. Not a very strategic exercise, all said, as there is a great deal of stumbling about by highly intelligent, intellectually-insecure twenty-somethings through problems on their own.

During my time at Yale, I also worked with Dr. Brian Scassellati at the Yale Social Robotics Lab (Department of Computer Science) on the use of non-verbal behaviors in human-robot communication.

I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Lafayette College, Easton, PA, and a Masters of Science and Masters of Philosophy in Engineering, both from Yale University, New Haven, CT.

If you’re looking to get in touch or find out more about what I’ve been up to, the highlights are recorded in the links below:

More information about my research projects, publications and side projects can be found in the links above.

In academia, I spent my life on various research and hobby projects. Since making a change to consulting, my primary hobby has been in developing better understanding of business concepts, especially as they relate to consulting and market analysis. 

Previous topics of interest, and things I am always happy to discuss, include: the philosophy of Lao Tsu, recursive logic, and the difficulties of statistical thinking.