Homepage

Welcome to my portfolio website! As I have been employed for the past two years, this website has not received much attention, but I am actively working to bring it up-to-date!

About me

My name is Tommy, and I have a passion for computer science (and particularly research developments in deep learning) which I have been pursuing for the past decade.

I began studying computer science at Cal Poly SLO in 2014, with the dream of someday contributing to creating a real version of Jarvis from Ironman (2008). I thoroughly enjoyed the design and problem solving elements of coding projects, as well as the beautiful region around San Luis Obispo. During my freshman year, I joined the Data Science Club, quickly joining the board of the club to help organize events and becoming President of the club by my junior year. During my sophomore year, the Data Science minor was announced at Cal Poly - with a heavy focus on the statistical and coding elements of machine learning - and I pursued this, eventually graduating in the second cohort of students with the minor. Throughout this time, I had internships at Aerospace Inc., Unanimous AI, and - most importantly for my growth as a developer - at Amazon in SLO.

After my undergraduate studies, I made the difficult decision to leave Amazon SLO and commit to a PhD program starting in 2018 at Dartmouth with an advisor recommended by one of my mentors at Cal Poly. I worked in a high-paced and challenging research environment where we focused on the intersection of the machine learning and cybersecurity fields. During this time I worked on several projects, but only published two. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, it served as the impetus I needed to realize that I would see better personal and career growth and development if I returned to industry rather than staying in the lab. I ended up finishing my time at Dartmouth by taking a variety of challenging project courses in applied computation (rendering algorithms, networking, concurrent algorithms, security/privacy of machine learning, etc.) in order to prepare me for a transition into industry where I could be prepared for work in most applied computing fields. I left Dartmouth with my Masters degree in CS in December of 2021.

In May 2022, I started at American Express as a data scientist in a new research team which aimed to focus on applications of advanced graph and machine learning methods to AMEX Problems. I was the first person hired on the team, and was hired because of my blend of technical experience in software development as well as my theoretical expertise in AI/ML gained from my two years of research experience. Rapidly, I began contributing by assessing the value of different methods as applied to our data (ask me more in an interview! Naturally, cannot share everything on a website). We added another teammate two months after I joined, and I served to help accelerate her onboarding process. I quickly joined a working team focused on engaging low-tenure colleagues and addressing their needs in order to have a wider effect in improving onboarding, as well as developing resources on our internal wiki to help support other new colleagues. About a year after I joined, my team was brought into the AI Labs space (meaning a change in title from ‘Data Scientist’ to ‘AI Research Scientist’) at AMEX rather than our previous Risk assignment, and we were assigned to applying SOTA methods to marketing tasks. Since then, we have added four new teammates and two have transitioned out of our team leaving us at a headcount of five. I serve as the most senior member of my team now, providing support and leadership to help my colleagues as well as leading multiple projects.

Want to learn more?

Take a look around, you can find more information about me in the About tab above, information about my projects in the Projects tab, contact information in the Contact tab as well as in the footer, and my blog posts listed further down on this page (none yet, but a few are in the works!).