Many students in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) program return to the workplace primed to tackle complex operational problems. But sometimes their research sparks deep scholarly interest, and they bring their LGO toolkit into an academic career instead. That was the case for Jimmy Smith SM ’18, MBA ’18, who’s currently pursuing a PhD in computational mathematics at Stanford University. He specializes in machine learning models for sequence data. Smith was ready to accelerate his career as a drilling engineer at BP Exploration Alaska, so he enrolled in the…