Brian is a data scientist based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, after a long stretch in Washington, DC. He likes politics, startups, and trying to guess the Oscar winners each year.

   

Toolkit

AI & Agents

MCP server design, LLM application development, agent evaluation harnesses

Technologies

Python, TypeScript, STATA, PostgreSQL, mySQL, MongoDB, UNIX, Git, JavaScript, React.js, Node.js, Neo4j

Deployment

AWS, Google Cloud, Databricks, Flask, FastAPI, Docker, Kubernetes, Pivotal Cloud Foundry

Certifications

Certified ScrumMaster, AWS Web Services Cloud Practitioner, AWS Certified Machine Learning - Specialty, AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty

Machine Learning Libraries

Pandas, NumPy, Statsmodels, SciKit-Learn, Scipy, NLTK, Gensim, spaCy, PyMC3, PyStan, PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras

Presentation & Visualization

Jupyter, Matplotlib, Bokeh, Plotly Dash, Tableau, Powerpoint, HTML/CSS

Polling

Survey sampling methodology, A/B testing, Catalist, SSI, VAN

Experience

Korra (Ledger Investing)

New York, NY
Financial technology brokerage and analysis firm for insurance-linked securities
Senior Data Scientist / Machine Learning Engineer September 2022 - present

  • Proposed and developed MCP interfaces for the platform’s transaction and document-extraction services; now lead the initiative and demo new capabilities to clients and prospects.
  • Shipped interactive MCP apps for loss triangles, financial reporting, forecasting, and portfolio insights, with data fetched at render time rather than passed through model context.
  • Developed workflows for ingestion, validation, valuation, and reporting as the firm turned bespoke analytics for casualty insurance transactions into a generalized platform for insurance and reinsurance counterparties.
  • Own the bordereau pipeline end to end in the platform’s TypeScript and Python codebases, from Excel ingestion and validation through client-facing interfaces; previously applied the firm’s Bayesian valuation models to price prospective deals and renewals and contributed to backtesting infrastructure.

OneGlobe

Reston, VA
Federal technology contractor staffing Kessel Run, a US Air Force software factory
Data Scientist / Technical Lead May 2020 - September 2022

  • Took on technical leadership for a user analytics platform deployed to classified Air Force networks, directing engineering decisions for a team of 4–7 and reviewing code across the stack.
  • Extended a JavaScript analytics library to fit Air Force frontend standards and contributed to a companion Java library for backend services; both made available for integration across other product teams.
  • Analyzed event data in Python against a Postgres warehouse and replaced an initial Grafana-based approach after it proved undeployable on airgapped networks, learning React to build custom dashboards deployed on Kubernetes.

U.Group

Washington, DC
Design and technology firm staffing Defense Intelligence Agency and DHS
Data Scientist November 2018 - May 2020

  • Implemented NLP and graph algorithms for entity resolution and analysis of military intelligence data, along with a custom API to serve results.
  • Led development of data pipeline for military intelligence product prototype to ingest, transform, and build relationships in a graph database as an implementation of a knowledge graph for proprietary data.
  • Deployed prototype pipeline as microservices architecture using Docker on a client-owned AWS instance.

Excella Consulting

Arlington, VA
Agile transformation firm consulting for corporate and government clients
Data Scientist – Senior Consultant August 2017 - November 2018

  • Restructured Monte Carlo simulation in Python to estimate a $100M change for a corporate hospitality client’s customer rewards program – improved model reduced run time by 70% and errors by 90%.
  • Developed reporting and quality assurance mechanisms to delivery impact to financial and loyalty stakeholders.
  • Built application layer using Reactjs, MongoDB, and Flask to serve dashboard that uses deep learning to identify fraud in OIG audits.

General Assembly

Washington, DC
Full-time 12-week immersive program that develops statistical, programming, and data communication skills.
Data Science Immersive March - May 2017

  • Capstone project culminated in unsupervised natural language processing analysis of 750,000 complaints to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A classification algorithm correctly identified which of 17 products a consumer’s unstructured text referred to 77% of the time.
  • Other projects included a clustering analysis of higher education spending, webscraping salary classification, random forest feature importance assessment of income tax returns on county-level voting patterns in the 2016 election.

NC Coordinated Campaign

Mooresville, NC
Part of DNC effort to elect Hillary Clinton president and other Democrats to federal and statewide offices.
Regional Get Out the Vote Director October – November 2016

  • Provided tactical and logistical support for GOTV operations

Kaiser Associates

Washington, DC
Kaiser Associates is a boutique strategy consulting firm for Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare, technology, and consumer goods sectors.
Consultant, Business Strategy & Operations November 2014 – October 2016

  • Developed market assessments for products and services across industries through primary and secondary research, including: health economics analysis for $300 million medical device market, market entry for a new product category for a consumer goods company, and assessment of a firm’s value proposition for a private equity valuation and acquisition strategy.
  • Presented market data on industry standards for operational benchmarks to senior leadership in the healthcare, technology, and consumer goods spaces.

The Advisory Board Company

Washington, DC
The Education Advisory Board division provides strategic research and technology to university executives through qualitative research.
Analyst, Strategic Higher Education Research October 2013 – October 2014
Research Associate, Custom Higher Education Research January – October 2013

  • Produced original best practice research regarding student retention and graduation for at-risk students, conducting interviews with more than 150 university executives.
  • Provided real-time data analysis of organizational trends to more than 120 university partners.
  • Authored more than 30 original research reports as recommendations for institutional stakeholders on higher education issues from budget models to minority recruitment and retention.
  • Conducted market opportunity analyses to inform program choices for 20+ colleges and universities.

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research

Washington, DC
Global strategic consultancy and political polling firm serving campaigns, non-profits and corporations.
Project Associate, Domestic Political Consulting Division January – December 2012
Research Associate, Operations Management Group September 2010 – December 2011

  • Analyzed polling data and drafted messaging strategies for top-tier political candidates, issue campaigns, and campaign committees, contributing language and analyzing data for more than 20 political races in 2012.
  • Managed project execution and methodology, negotiated budget expenditures of more than $1 million in qualitative and quantitative research at a net profit of at least $250,000 in 2011.
  • Developed innovative sampling methodology for mobile phones, web panels and traditional landlines, improving response rates by 25% among targeted demographics.

Speaking and Presentation

Education

General Assembly

Data Science Immersive March – May 2017

  • Full-time 12-week immersive course in the full life cycle of being a data scientist: from data ingestion, scraping, cleaning, mining to modeling (KNN, decision trees, ensembling, regression, forecasting, neural networks, clustering, Bayesian inference, etc) to deployment (AWS).
  • Statistical programming taught in Python; libraries included: Pandas, NumPy, Statsmodels, SciKit-Learn, BeautifulSoup, NLTK, Gensim, PyMC
  • Other programming tools included: PostgreSQL, mySQL

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

B.A. Economics, Political Science May 2010

  • Minor in Creative Writing
  • Certificate in Business Journalism
  • Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg; Freiburg, Germany (August – December 2008)

Volunteer & Open Source Activity

  • Sanctuary Sheriffs: leading ongoing project to assess law enforcement responsiveness to ICE deportation requests for every local jurisdiction in the United States.
  • Daily Kos Presidential vote-by-LD project: contributor to an ongoing effort to map the US presidential vote to each legislative district in the country.