The work, the research,
and the person behind it.

My research career began at the University of Notre Dame, where I earned my B.S. cum laude, M.S., and Ph.D. in Computer Science under the mentorship of Nitesh Chawla. My doctoral work focused on link prediction in complex networks, developing new methods and rigorous evaluation frameworks that challenged prevailing assumptions in the field. That work appeared in venues like ACM SIGKDD and WWW and produced open-source tools like LPmade that other researchers could build on.

After a post-doctoral stint collaborating with Battelle and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on semantic network analysis, I spent six years as a researcher at McGill University's Human Pain Genetics Lab. There I applied machine learning to multivariate genetic analysis: building high-performance tools in C and C++, designing database-driven web portals for collaborators, and administering the lab's entire computational infrastructure from managed switches and Infiniband to LTO tape libraries and ZFS. That breadth isn't unusual for me. It is just how I work, and it's born from a desire to immediately understand and solve a problem the moment I encounter it rather than put it aside and move on.

My industry career started at Lockheed Martin, where I was selected for the Engineering Leadership Development Program, a rotational position for high-potential new hires. I worked on mission-critical defense systems in C, C++, Ada, and Java, earning a spot award for rapid prototype delivery under tight constraints.

Today I am a Director of Technology at FINRA, where I have held three roles since 2022. I started by leading the natural language data science center of excellence, whose summarization, extraction, and classification work saved thousands of hours across regulatory workflows and whose 2024 Createathon entry won the hackathon's grand prize. That team planted the seed of FILLIP, FINRA's regulatory GenAI platform.

In 2025 I took over FILLIP as a research-grade application and re-engineered it into an enterprise product while it served live users: CI/CD, automated testing, blue-green deployment, an LLM gateway over Amazon Bedrock, and agentic retrieval. Within a year it was FINRA's most widely adopted platform, with more than 1,800 weekly active users. I now lead the firm's enterprise GenAI training, a curriculum of 6 tracks, 20 courses, and 87 modules.

Before FINRA I managed data science at Transamerica, after serving as Lead Data Scientist, where I built core libraries that became infrastructure for the team: a high-performance geospatial indexing library in C++ with Python bindings, cryptographic extensions to pandas, a model monitoring framework, and fast_read_sql, a pandas interface that reduced SQL result set loading time by 5x. I also led the migration of two analytics teams from Domino Data Lab to Amazon SageMaker.

Many people build side projects. I enjoy building my own infrastructure too. My home lab runs 28 self-hosted services with separate DEV, QA, and PROD environments, behind Authelia SSO and an LDAP directory: from Gitea and a Harbor registry with Trivy scanning to OpenBao secrets and shared LLM, embedding, and speech gateways. The workloads run on Kubernetes (k3s) with Flux GitOps, Renovate dependency automation, and CI/CD pipelines with smoke testing.

This passion for learning and building at all levels benefits and feeds into my professional work too. The same instincts that drive me to build reliable, maintainable systems at home inform how I approach data science infrastructure in the enterprise. Understanding systems from bare metal to production deployment makes me a better technical leader.

I'm a National Merit Scholar and Timken Company Scholar who grew up in Ohio before heading to Notre Dame, then a year near Minneapolis with Lockheed Martin, back to Notre Dame for graduate school, Montreal, and now Denver, with time living in China and Australia along the way. I've organized bike-to-work competitions and sustainability events and volunteered for cancer fundraisers. My personal interests include classical literature, woodworking, and photography. Most of all, I'm a father. My daughter is the best thing I've ever been part of, and everything else I do ranks second to being her Papa.