Data Scientist at USAA

Chris joined the Data Science team in USAA’s Enterprise Data Insights organization in August 2017 as a research data scientist. His mission is to develop innovation solutions to both member and business facing problems by applying his strong analytic skills and technical computing knowledge. To accomplish this, he collaborates with university professors, business experts, USAA’s Machine Learning Laboratory, and data scientists from around USAA.

Graduate School and Physics

Prior to joining USAA, Chris obtained his Ph.D. (2017) in high-energy nuclear physics and MS (2012) in physics from the University of California at Davis. During his graduate career he worked on projects at Berkeley and Brookhaven National Laboratories where he participated in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) as part of the CMS Collaboration and Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) as part of the STAR collaboration. His thesis research pertains to studying phase change phenomena in hot and dense nuclear matter.

As part of his graduate education Chris developed algorithms and models which were deployed in highly distributed computing systems, performed data engineering tasks to design efficient data structures and data access patterns for optimal performance in those distributed systems, and was involved in defining the scientific direction of the research group in which he worked.

Personal

When Chris isn't working he enjoys spending time with his fiancée, visiting National Parks, learning new programing languages, tinkering with Google Cloud, reading, and spending time with his family. His favorite sport is sand volleyball, his favorite color is blue, his dream car is a Porsche 911 Carrera 4S, and he enjoys wine.

Data Scientist I - USAA

August 2017 - Current

I am a research data scientst who works with other data scientists and business partners to provide innovative solutions to both customer and business facing problems. Some techniques I use are machine learning, statistical modeling, mathematical modeling, dimensionality reduction, feature engineering, and big data mining methods.

Graduate Student Researcher - Department of Physics, UC Davis

January 2013 - June 2017

Worked independently, collaboratively, and as a leader of a group of other analyzers to organize and execute research projects. Presented details, summaries, and results of analyses at various levels of conferences and in papers. Developed a sophisticated analysis pipeline for a multi-terabyte sized data set that was deployed on a highly distributed computing platform.

Graduate Student and Teaching Assistant - Department of Physics, UC Davis

September 2010 - December 2012

While working on my master's degree I taught general physics laboratories. This experience allowed me to develop explanatory skills which I continue to find useful today.

2016

Rapidity Density Distributions of Identified Protons from the RHIC Beam Energy Scan at STAR (Talk) - Division of Nuclear Physics

2015

Coulomb effect in Au+Au and Pb+Pb collisions as a function of collision energy (Paper) - Physical Review C

The Rapidity Density Distributions and Longitudinal Expansion Dynamics of Identified Pions from the STAR Beam Energy Scan (Paper)(Talk) - Quark Matter 2015

2014

Energy Dependence of the Width of the Pion Rapidity Density Distribution from STAR (Talk) - Division of Nuclear Physics

2012

Fixed Target Results from STAR (Talk) - Division of Nuclear Physics