Experience

  1. Staff Quantitative Researcher

    Meta

    Nov 2021 - Present | Bellevue, WA

    • Designed and ran large-scale A/B and quasi-experiments to evaluate new product features, directly informing multi-billion-dollar revenue decisions.
    • Defined and operationalized north-star metrics for ad quality and user experience that became standards across product and engineering teams.
    • Built production data pipelines in SQL and Python to integrate surveys with experimentation, enabling self-serve analytics at org scale.
    • Partnered with product and engineering on trust and safety systems to balance fraud risk, implementation cost, and customer experience.
    • Deployed large language model pipelines to classify millions of pieces of user feedback, creating new quality signals for ranking models.
    • Delivered dashboards that merged behavioral data, surveys, and ML outputs, adopted by hundreds of stakeholders for decision-making.
    • Served on the Ads core leadership team, shaping strategy and execution for a group responsible for a significant share of company revenue.
  2. Data Scientist

    C. Light Technologies, Inc.

    Mar 2021 - Nov 2021 | Berkeley, CA

    • Built software classifiers to automatically detect poor-quality retinal scans, improving diagnostic reliability.
    • Collaborated with hardware engineers to embed the detection system into devices, enabling real-time rejection of invalid scans.
    • Contributed to patent US20250057414A1 on retinal disease detection methods (https://patents.google.com/patent/US20250057414A1).
  3. Research Scientist (Postdoc)

    Center for Perceptual Systems, University of Texas at Austin

    Aug 2015 - Mar 2021 | Austin, TX

    • Designed computational models of human perception using Bayesian inference, machine learning, and large-scale neuroimaging data.
    • Built reproducible pipelines and simulation frameworks to study cognitive performance and visual attention under uncertainty.
    • Published first-author research in venues such as Current Biology and AAAI, translating findings into perception and decision-making algorithms.
    • Partnered across neuroscience, psychology, and computer science to prototype ML-driven methods and secure multidisciplinary funding.

Education

  1. B.A. (Hons) in Cognitive Science

    Simon Fraser University
    B.A. (Hons) in Cognitive Science, Simon Fraser University (2009).
  2. Ph.D.

    University of Edinburgh
    Ph.D., University of Edinburgh (completed 2015).
Skills & Hobbies
Technical Skills
Python & PyTorch
Machine Learning
Cloud Computing (AWS/GCP)
Hobbies
Hiking in the Rockies
Building Custom PCs
Sci-Fi Reading
Awards
Best Paper Award
NeurIPS ∙ December 2022
Awarded for groundbreaking work on efficient training of large models.
AI Innovation Grant
National Science Foundation ∙ June 2021
$500,000 grant for research in ethical AI development.
Outstanding PhD Thesis
Stanford University ∙ June 2019
Recognized for contributions to scaling laws in deep learning.
Languages
100%
English
50%
Spanish