Jeffrey A. Shaffer is the Director of the Applied AI Lab and the Kirk and Jacki Perry Professor of Analytics and Assistant Professor-Educator at the University of Cincinnati in the Carl H. Lindner College of Business. He was awarded the 2016 and 2021 Adjunct Faculty of the Year Award for Operations, Business Analytics and Information Systems. He is an active speaker at conferences, symposiums, universities, and corporate training programs on the topic of data visualization, data analytics, artificial intelligence, Generative AI, and Tableau. Mr. Shaffer has also taught data visualization at the KPMG Advisory University, and for the University of Cincinnati Center for Business Analytics, and many Fortune 500 companies.
Mr. Shaffer previously served as the Chief Operating Officer and Vice President of Information Technology and Analytics at Unifund and Recovery Decision Science. He joined Unifund in 1996 and has been instrumental in the creation and development of the AI systems, analytics, and the business intelligence platform at Unifund. Mr. Shaffer holds a BM and MM degree from the University of Cincinnati and an MBA from Xavier University where he was the winner of the 2006 Graduate Student Scholarly Project in Research. Mr. Shaffer has attended the Harvard Business School's Executive Education Program, is a Certified Manager of Quality and Organizational Excellence through the American Society for Quality, a Certified Project Management Professional through the Project Management Institute and has completed Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt training with the Xavier Consulting Group.
Mr. Shaffer was a finalist in the 2011 Tableau Interactive Visualization Competition, one of the Elite 8 in the 2014 Tableau Sports Visualization Contest, the winner of the 2014 Tableau Quantified Self Visualization Contest and competed in the 2014 Tableau Iron Viz Contest. He was a five-time Tableau Zen Master (now Tableau Visionary), and in 2021 was inducted into the Tableau Visionary Hall of Fame, one of twenty-three in world. He is also the co-founder and leader of the Cincinnati Tableau User Group.
Mr. Shaffer is an author of The Big Book of Dashboards which was on the Shortlist for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards in 2017. He curates the TableauReferenceGuide.com and has blogged on the topics of Data Visualization and Tableau at DataPlusScience.com which was on the Shortlist for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards in 2016. His visualization Beautiful Trash was on the Longlist for the Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards in 2017 and featured as one of the 75 Truly Creative and Brilliant Infographic Design Examples of 2017 by Column Five Media. He is also the co-host of Chart Chat which was awarded the 2021 Data Literacy award for the Most Interesting Data Podcast.
