“We are here at the Lavietes Pavilion and Harvard is set to tip off against Florida Atlantic at eight o’clock tonight,” says Ben T. Zauzmer. His tone has diverged from conversational—he’s in the zone.\xa0

“The team is one and one so far, a bit of a shaky start compared to where we started,” he continues. Zauzmer calls both the men’s basketball and football games for WHRB. If you’ve ever ridden a Harvard shuttle during game time, chances are his voice was playing over the radio.\xa0

“It is an absolute thrill—the moment that that light goes on and you know you’re live—it’s just an adrenaline rush like no other that goes on for the next two hours,” he says of the broadcasts.

An avid sports fan, Zauzmer knew from a young age that his contributions to sports would not be on the courts or fields. “I played little league baseball for 11 years, and basketball for 11 years as well, and frankly, was terrible. I couldn’t hit or catch, and I couldn’t pass or shoot,” Zauzmer recalls.

Zauzmer was 10 years old when he picked up Michael Lewis’ bestseller, “Moneyball.” “It really changed my life,” he emphasizes. “It made me realize that there was a place in the game for someone like me.”\xa0

An Applied Math concentrator with a Computer Science secondary, Zauzmer has been able to apply his knack for numbers to his passion for sports.\xa0

This past summer, he worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers doing statistics and computer programming. His projects there ran the gamut, but all had “the final goal of trying to help the team win baseball games.” Similarly, at Harvard, he writes for The Harvard Sports Analysis Collective.

For Zauzmer, applying his math skills to real-life challenges and having his views published is nothing new. While attending an IOP event, Zauzmer came up with the idea to create a statistical method to predict Oscar winners.\xa0

“If you can do this stuff for baseball, if you can do this for politics, you should totally be able to do this for the Oscars, right?” In Zauzmer’s case, thought soon became reality.

“Like any cool kid,” he quips, “I spent about a month in Lamont typing ones and zeros into Excel.” The result? A mathematical model that predicted 16 of the 20 Academy Awards correctly this past year. He beat Nate Silver both years that they went head-to-head.\xa0

Zauzmer has landed a gig for the Hollywood Reporter, appropriately titled “Oscarlytics,” to share his work, and has received press coverage in nine different languages.

When asked if he expected the success, Zauzmer responds honestly. “To a certain extent, yes, I did,” he admits. “It’s not to sound like I have too much hubris or a lack of humility. It much more comes from the fact that there are certain methods in statistics where you can sort of have an inkling into how well are you going to do in this prediction game.”

As he goes on, he constantly gives credit to others: Professor Donald H. Pfister and Professor Joseph K. Blitzstein’s course on Data Science for his success with the Dodgers, his blockmates for their social media prowess in publicizing his work, and finally, his family for his ethos.

Zauzmer’s value system is heavily predicated on a desire to serve. Designated a Coca-Cola Scholar in part for his service work in high school, Zauzmer has given back at Harvard through serving as co-executive director of the Small Claims Advisory Service, an organization that provides legal counsel to those involved in the small claims court in Massachusetts.

With regard to next year, he explains, “There is no way I see myself going more than a few weeks at a time, however long it takes to really move into a new apartment, before I start to get involved in the community and try to make a difference.”

Although Zauzmer hopes to fulfill his lifelong dream of working in baseball next year, his roommate Alex A. Wirth ’15 has a challenge for the future. “I personally would love to see what Ben could do in government and politics,” says Alex. “His such diverse experiences, skillsets, relationships with people would be a great way to make the world a better place.”