about me

I’m a Model Risk Officer at Capital One with a background that probably looks unusual for this kind of role. I did my PhD in integrative biology at UT Austin, studying how animals make decisions: mate choice, foraging, social group selection. The core question I kept returning to was: when does a model of behavior make accurate predictions, and when does it quietly fail? That question turns out to be more useful in finance than I expected.

After grad school, I spent several years on the first-line side of ML: building models, scaling infrastructure, and figuring out what it actually takes to keep a model behaving in production. That work taught me that model failures are usually operational: drift, edge cases, features that degrade quietly in production. But the operational failures almost always trace back to assumptions that were never seriously questioned at design time. The interesting work is connecting those two things.

I moved to model risk because I wanted to work on that gap more deliberately. My focus is on the assumptions embedded in model design and elevating modeling practice across the company.

values

I am a constant learner. The world is constantly changing and in my view, the ability adapt and update the way you look at the world is essential. I also find learning immensely rewarding on its own.

When I first got to grad school, I gave a talk to my new department. A senior faculty member whose work I admired showed up: I was both nervous but also elated he would show up to my talk. As soon as I hit my acknowledgements slide, he sprinted towards exit sign and out of the room. Since then, I’ve realized the ability to communicate effectively is foundational. I spent many days holed up in the library reading books about how to write better, give more effective presentations, and talk to people to better communicate my ideas. I’m still constantly thinking through how to best persuade someone to see my point of view or communicate a decision.

My personal motto is ‘always be better’: I’m constantly looking for ways to improve. I go to bed reading books to hone my thinking better and guard against cognitive biases. I’m always on the search for new tools or approaches that allow me to do things better, faster, or smarter.