Resume
Ryan N. Lichtenwalter, Ph.D.
GenAI and data science engineering leader and versatile developer
Experience
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)
Denver, Colorado
Director of Technology, Enterprise GenAI Solutions Engineering Training May 2026 – Present
- Built FINRA's corporate GenAI curriculum as sole content developer in five months: 6 tracks, 20 courses, and 87 modules covering prompt engineering, retrieval, agents and MCP, evaluation, and production LLM concerns
Director of Technology, Regulatory GenAI January 2025 – May 2026
- Turned FILLIP, FINRA's regulatory GenAI platform, from a research-grade application into an enterprise product while it served live users; within a year it had more than 1,800 weekly active users, over half of all employees
- Instituted CI/CD, automated testing, and blue-green deployment, moving from ad hoc to weekly releases; defined an LLM gateway over Amazon Bedrock and an agentic retrieval architecture
- Led a team of eight, hiring two, and oversaw two promotions
Director of Technology, Data Science September 2022 – January 2025
- Led the natural language data science center of excellence (team of seven), delivering summarization, extraction, and classification across regulatory workflows and saving thousands of hours
- Technical lead of the 2024 FINRA Createathon team that won the grand prize among 32 teams from 11 departments
- Oversaw three promotions, including a skip-level promotion
Transamerica
Denver, Colorado
Manager, Data Science March 2021 – August 2022
- Led a data science team across sales forecasting, fraud detection, underwriting automation, and customer segmentation, hiring three full-time employees, four interns, and a rotation program participant
- Led the migration of two analytics teams from Domino Data Lab to Amazon SageMaker to cut costs
Lead Data Scientist December 2019 – March 2021
- Built core libraries: high-performance geospatial indexing (C++/Python), cryptographic pandas extensions, model monitoring framework, fast_read_sql (5x faster SQL loading)
Human Pain Genetics Lab, McGill University
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Researcher January 2014 – December 2019
- Applied machine learning to multivariate genetic analysis using custom C/C++ tools
- Built database-driven web portals and analysis platforms for collaborators
- Administered lab computational infrastructure: HPC, networking, storage, security
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana
Post-doctoral Researcher May 2012 – August 2012
- Developed mathematical models for large-scale network data with Battelle and PNNL
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Eagan, Minnesota
Engineering Leadership Development Program June 2006 – July 2007
- Software design and prototyping for mission-critical defense systems in C, C++, Ada, Java
- Received Spot Award for rapid prototype delivery under tight constraints
Education
Ph.D., Computer Science
2012University of Notre Dame
Dissertation: Link Prediction. Adviser: Nitesh Chawla
M.S., Computer Science
2009University of Notre Dame
Thesis: Knowledge Acquisition in Dynamic Data
B.S., Computer Science
2006University of Notre Dame
Cum laude, With Honors in Engineering
Awards & Fellowships
FINRA BOND Awards
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, peer- and manager-nominated
10 awards
2022–Present
Createathon Grand Prize and Challenge Division
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority
32 teams, 11 departments
2024
Arthur J. Schmitt Presidential Fellowship
University of Notre Dame
2007–2011
Timken Company Scholar
The Timken Company
2002–2006
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
National Science Foundation
Honorable Mention
2009
National Merit Scholar
National Merit Scholarship Corporation
2002
CRC Award for Computational Sciences
University of Notre Dame
2012