Background

I feel that my career path has essentially been a randomwalk. I enjoyed studying calculus and science in high school, but I did not feel drawn to a specific major when enrolling at The University of Texas at San Antonio in 2005. I chose Biology as my major and decided to pursue mathematics as a minor. In a remarkable twist of fate, my biology professor received a grant to establish a student scholarship program. Its purpose was to encourage Biology students to work in computational labs and mathematics students to work in biological labs as student researchers. This seemed like a perfect opportunity for me. The stipend wasn’t quite enough for me to live on my own, but by living at home I could pay for all of my university related costs.

Dr. Fidel Sanatamaria agreed to let me join his lab in the fall of 2007. It turned out to be a fantastic learning experience. I am forever grateful for Dr. Santamaria’s mentorship; I learned so much from him. It was there that I learned to use MATLAB, MCell3, Linux, create bash scripts and create parallel computing jobs on the Texas Advanced Computing Center’s (TACC) cluster.

But, due to family tragedy in 2007, I found myself mentally and emotionally exhausted by the time I graduated in 2009. I enrolled in a PhD program at Rice University anyway, but only lasted a semester and-a-half. I pulled myself together and enrolled in a Master’s for Biomedical Engineering at UTSA in 2011. Again, I was fantastically lucky in that I found a paid position to work in Dr. Matthew Reilly’s lab. Dr. Reilly was also a fantastic mentor. It was there that I started learning applied statistics.

After graduating I was able to find a job with the City of Austin performing ad hoc statistical analyses on crime data. I learned to use R, Python, Scikit-Learn, and SQL…and that San Antonio has far better tacos than Austin. In 2019, I moved back to San Antonio with my wife and I got a job as a Senior Financial Analyst with KCI, a biomedical company that specialized in selling wound vac services. They were bought by 3M in the fall of 2019. I mastered the art of creating compelling dashboards with Tableau and experimented with XGBoost’s accelerated-failure-time objective function. I retained my job through the beginning of the pandemic but was ultimately laid off in 2021. I was then able to find work with EY as a Senior Data Analyst. And that is where I am now!

Current Interests

I enjoy using the bayesian approach to statistics. It feels very natural to define variables of interest with a prior distribution. I am convinced that a prior structure/set of assumptions must be adopted for an analysis to be of value. Thus, I am also very interested in causal inference. I am learning to use AWS. I very much would like to improve at trading options, so I am always on the lookout for new/better ways to forecast stock prices. One day, I’ll get around to learning Blender or maybe comfyUI and do something truly creative. Until then, I’ll just continue my random-walk through life. :)