Andrew-John "AJ" Hickman consults for BEST by contributing databases and maps of Minority-Servings Institutions (MSIs) to BEST's partners.  He provided technical support to the Department of Defense (DoD) and its Advanced Manufacturing Program by evaluating MSIs for DoD Manufacturing Innovation Institutes (MIIs) through an extensive analysis of MSI websites and course catalogs. He also supported the DoD Diversity Management Operations Center (DMOC) through his analyses of MSIs for factor-based recommendations, for university profiles, and for operational proximity reviews. He is focused on supporting data-driven decision-making through his work.  AJ enjoys learning languages, including Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, as well as programming languages such as Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. He studied and taught in Japan for 7 years before consulting with BEST.