I’m a data scientist living in Chicago. I have experience in financial markets and software product analytics. I enjoy learning new technologies and creating reproducible data science projects.

brian.deignan@pm.me LinkedIn GitHub

Experience

Morningstar

Senior Data Scientist (2020-Present) Chicago, IL

    • Reduced the onboarding time of risk model development from weeks to just a few days by dockerizing our Spark development environment
    • Developed a new European equity risk model using Spark and delivered it a month ahead of schedule
    • Built a statistical backtesting library in Python to evaluate our quantitative equity ratings systems
    • Created an ETL pipeline in Python that extracts unstructured real-time stock market data and transforms it into a relational format for Amazon Athena

Data Scientist (2018-2020) Chicago, IL

    • Built a parser of high-frequency financial market data in Python that recreated the state of the limit order book using self-balancing trees
    • Predicted individual-level churn of hundreds of thousands of retirement platform customers using random survival forests
    • Led four quant team apprentice and intern projects to derive customer insights from our retirement platform data
    • Taught a one-day course on machine learning for our Quant Bootcamp program

Associate Data Scientist (2016-2018) Washington, D.C. & Chicago, IL

    • Built and A/B tested a stacked ensemble model in R that increased product adoption by 9% over five months
    • Discovered most common software usage patterns by building an ETL process and analyzing usage log data using a graph database (Neo4j)
    • Scrum master for the data science team

HelloWallet

Data Analyst (2014-2016) Washington, D.C.

    • Researched and found the main driver of user engagement which was used to change our product onboarding experience
    • Created external-facing interactive Tableau dashboards that reached 20+ enterprise clients
    • Conducted a priori power calculations to ensure the validity and feasibility of our product’s A/B tests
    • ETL and maintenance of the analytics team's MySQL data warehouse

Education

Master's in Computer Science, University of Illinois (2019-2020)

Master's in Economics, George Mason University (2012-2014)

Bachelor's in Economics and Spanish, Western Kentucky University (2008-2012)

Skills

Programming Python, R, Java, SQL
Technology Spark, Docker, Amazon Web Services
Statistics Bayesian Modeling, Times Series, Panel Data, Causal Inference
Machine Learning Supervised, Unsupervised, Deep Learning, Dimensionality Reduction

Certificates