About

I'm a researcher and quantitative scientist with dual experience on the academic side — a Chicago PhD in evolutionary biology and long-standing scientific collaborations across Latin America, Europe, and the United States — and on the applied side, with more than a decade of building analytics, experimentation, and machine-learning practices inside US technology companies. My methodological work spans statistics, mathematical modeling, machine learning, and applied AI. I work bilingually in English and Spanish, and my sustained interest is less in any particular industry than in the underlying questions, the ones that standard tools cannot solve, that fall between disciplines, or that demand real methodological care to answer honestly. Through Datatheon, the adopted partnership I lead, I work alongside research teams, private companies, governments, and NGOs on questions that outpace the tools they currently have, joining each engagement as part of the team rather than delivering from outside. Recent work has spanned historical ecology, health-systems administration, marketing research, AI advisory sessions, and interdisciplinary studies that connect specialists across institutions. Datatheon is a neurodivergent-friendly practice: we welcome collaborators, partners, and clients across the full range of ways people think, work, and communicate — because distinctive minds tend to notice what others miss.

Experience

Head of Data Science at Datatheon

United States

  • IESA (Jul 2025 - Sep 2025, Dr. Sofia Esqueda H. and Dr. Alfredo Rios, Center of Marketing): Life history invariants with bounded variables cannot be distinguished from data generated by random processes using standard analyses
  • Explored matrix instability in the multivariate analysis of luxury surveys with Likert type answers, using EFAs and CFAs on simulated data from experimental polychoric correlation matrices.
  • Used latent variable approaches (from Cholesky Decompositions), copula functions, and iterative methods to simulate data.
  • Higham's algorithm was used to smooth non-invertible correlation matrices to their nearest PSDs.

Data Scientist at JumStep, Inc.

United States

  • Analyzed variables related to tech companies to enhance job matching efficiency.
  • Designed an AI-based job recommendation system to optimize professional success for job seekers.

Staff Business Analyst at The Trade Desk

Ventura, California, United States

  • Provided tactical support to two Business Intelligence managers and mentored analysts on statistics and advanced methods.
  • Reported to the Sr. Director of Business Intelligence.
  • Built predictive scores ranking advertisers according to their Q1-Q3 programmatic guaranteed (PG) dynamic spend in top publishers (e.g., Disney, Paramount, Spokeo), a suboptimal market for the company representing about 20% (>$800M) of the total. Score allowed client services to dissuade expected Q4 PG important spenders (>$100K).

Data Scientist, Consultant at Datatheon

California, United States

  • IESA (Feb 2024 - Dec 2024, Dr. Sofia Esqueda H., Center of Marketing): Analyzed semantic spaces of online reviews from small luxury boutique hotels of the Northern Spanish Wine Route ($22B market in 2024). Modeled perceived review usefulness, uncovering its significant positive association with semantic topics and non-semantic text descriptors. Results presented at Business Association of Latin American Studies Conference (BALAS 2025, Costa Rica, April 8-10, Contribution 156).
  • INTELCON Systems (Jul 2024, Domingo Vargas, CTO): Provided AI technical and tactical support to leadership and engineering, in order to improve predictive model performance.

Principal Data Scientist at HONK Technologies

Greater Los Angeles Area

  • Provided tactical and strategic support to leadership, product, and growth teams.
  • Mentored colleagues on experimental design, systems theory, data science, Looker, SQL, and R.
  • Reported to the CTO (2019-2020) and the VP of Product (2020-2022).
  • Managed data science schema of the analytics database on AWS Redshift, and administered data analytics platform Looker, coded in LookML, created reports, and managed data models.
  • Created optimization models based on geo-location data that identified the least risky and more productive providers when completing most local jobs (with CTO). Results led to an improved hybrid operations model and a new risk factor parameter.
  • Predicted most costly and difficult jobs (binary class., 80% accuracy) using pre-dispatch data. Raised their dispatch prices in advance just enough to improve their chances to be completed faster but making them more affordable than predicted.

Chief Data Science Officer at ReqCenter

Seattle, Washington, United States

Startup based in Seattle, WA, incorporated in May 14, 2019, closed in early 2021. ReqCenter offered a NLP SaaS solution able to increase the productivity of HR departments by managing the job requisitions cycle, assisting in the writing of job descriptions, evaluating job requisitions and salaries, matching job descriptions with resumes, and evaluating the experience and skills of the applicants, expected to reduce the manual labor of hiring by HR teams by about 30% or more.

  • I helped putting together business proposal and logos, and participated in meetings with tech team developing the web interface for the app.
  • Collaborated in planning meetings with potential investors (expecting $500K), planned the structure of the remote data team, and designed the data strategy.

Data Scientist at LegalZoom

Greater Los Angeles Area

  • Provided tactical, strategic, and GDPR data compliance support to CEO, CMO, VPs of Marketing, Sales, Acquisition, Retention, Web Optimization, and Product teams.
  • Reported to the Senior Director of Analytics (2016-2017) and to the VP of Data Science (2018-2019).
  • Managed and mentored two data scientists. Together, we updated, scaled, and automated the ABC testing procedures, shortened test deployment time, modernized statistical testing, and introduced synthetic controls and new financial KPIs.
  • Used segmentation techniques to identify pre-determined intent on site.
  • Worked with data engineers on the Business Intelligence team in redesigning sections of the business database on Microsoft SQLServer, creating sandboxes for analytics and data mining experiments, and adding new KPIs to track new products.
  • Designed, created, and maintained a Snowflake’s cloud database, with actual, transformed, and engineered data subsets from the business, the Google Analytics/BigQuery, and the SalesForce databases.
  • Built ML models to classify reliability of sales leads using visitors’s activities on the website (binary class., 70% accuracy), according to transactions made through email, phone, or chat with sales agents.

Senior Statistical Analyst at LegalZoom

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Data Scientist, Consultant at Datatheon DBA

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Senior Statistical Analyst at MyLife.com

Greater Los Angeles Area

  • Provided tactical and strategic support to leadership, product, and marketing teams.
  • Led weekly KPIs all-hands meetings (2015-2016).
  • Reported to the VP of Business Intelligence (2013-2015) and CEO (2015-2016).
  • Managed one data engineer.
  • Discussed and implemented architectural / schema improvements to the business database teaming with the head database engineer, the analytics data engineer, and the head of product.
  • Led product AB tests design and automation by committing large SQL queries and worked with engineers running inhouse testing software tools to evaluate code in the experiment groups before being deployed.
  • Led and administered reporting platform and supervised one data engineer.
  • Modified and automated changes in the database (Informatica) according to analytics or reporting needs.
  • Implemented parametric and randomization techniques to describe user intent on site. Results led to creating a new product that monitored and removed customer's personal information online.
  • Built linear multivariate models to forecast customer lifetime value (LTV) and forecast 24h subscription revenue per registrant. Using segmentation techniques showed that the average customer's age increased since business pivoted business to monitoring and identity protection services. Results were used by marketing to improve targeting.

Statistical Analyst at MyLife.com

Greater Los Angeles, California, United States

Co-Founder at Inktake LLC

Los Angeles Metropolitan Area

Inktake was a print-on-demand editorial for low-cost technical books written in Spanish. Subjects included mathematics, modeling, and statistics used to address biological questions.

Data Scientist, Consultant at VroomGirls, LLC

Santa Monica, CA

Uncovered in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database that men are 3x more likely than women to die in alcohol-related accidents, but their alcohol concentrations are lower (i.e., women have less water per body weight than men).

Data Scientist, Consultant at VroomGirls, LLC

Created and maintained a local database in PostgreSQL with Facebook data including >100 variables about education, work, and connectedness. Derived and coded a linear mixed scoring model describing their “professional attractiveness” to employers.

Lead Scientist, Modeling & Simulations Research Group at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Researcher, Center for Statistics and Mathematical Software (CESMa) at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

  • Modeled heavy metal data from carbonate cores and demonstrated that the mercury record in Southern Caribbean coral skeletons was not associated with historical oil industry activities but with the natural occurrence of mercuric sulfide and rain seasons.
  • Implemented application to test hypotheses on frequency and temporal domains of time series, using basic non-parametric and parametric tests. Estimated autocorrelation and cross-correlation parameters, allowed data homogenization, detrending, seasonal adjustment, filtering, and comparing models, such as ARMA and Bayesian.
  • Demonstrated that the historical release of fresh water and sediments by the Panama Canal damaged several communities of corals in an extensive area of the Caribbean Coast. This is the only study describing the impact of the operations of the original Panama Canal on marine communities.

Researcher, Doctorate in Interdisciplinary Sciences (STEM) at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Full Professor, Department of Environmental Studies at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

  • Designed and taught undergrad and grad courses and workshops on evolutionary biology, modeling, computational biology, geometric morphometrics, and bioinformatics (e.g., protein structure, base alignments, and phylogenetics).
  • Contributed research papers and co-edited books, edited / reviewed technical manuscripts, books, and grants.
  • Attended biological and other technical meetings, contributed talks, and spoke at national and international conferences.
  • Advised in projects about geometric morphometrics, population dynamics, epidemiology, systematics, data modeling and complex networks, statistics, experimental design, research in medicine (genes associated with heart failure in 60 yo and younger), economics (oil prices), and engineering (vehicular traffic).
  • Applied and developed projects for government, NGO, and private funding entities.

Researcher, Center of Strategic Studies at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Dean, Division of Biological Sciences at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Head, Department of Environmental Studies at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Visiting Scientist at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI)

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

  • Implemented statistical models and simulations and demonstrated that fishing pressure explained low densities and distribution of benthic organisms in Las Perlas Archipelago, Panama better than the distribution of substrates.
  • Contributed multiple studies on the autecology and fisheries of marine organisms that were used by Congreso Nacional de la Republica de Panama to declare Las Perlas Archipelago a Marine Protected Area.
  • Life-history parameters commonly used in studying sequential hermaphrodites, and widely accepted as invariants, may be artifacts of the statistical procedures used to derive them.
  • Modeled coiling morphologies on phylogenetic trees and showed that complex characters can re-evolve via a change in developmental timing rather than in location of gene expression.
  • Obtained grant funding and authored papers on discrete modeling of population dynamics, fisheries and ecological data analyses, mentored students, and taught workshops on quantitative modeling in biology.

Invited Researcher at National Center for Scientific Computation, Universidad de Los Andes

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Implemented molecular simulations demonstrating that the RNA of the cowpea chlorotic mottle virus loses its secondary structure and moves through the capsid channel by free diffusion when released into a host cell.

Head, Department of Environmental Studies at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Invited Researcher at Laboratory of Malaria, Center for Ecology, IVIC

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

  • Participated in computational biology projects and mentored graduate and undergraduate projects on systematics, epidemiology, comparative methods, evolutionary biology, and geometric morphometrics.
  • Implemented app to manage large database from the North American Bird Survey, https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eesc/science/north-american-breeding- bird-survey.

Lecturer, Department of Environmental Studies at Universidad Simón Bolívar

Municipio Baruta, Miranda State, Venezuela

Head of Marine Station at Universidad Simón Bolívar, Instituto de Tecnología y Ciencias Marinas (INTECMAR)

Quizandal, Puerto Cabello, Carabobo State, Venezuela

Head of Marine Station at Fundación Científica Los Roques

Cayo Dos Mosquises, Los Roques Archipelago, Venezuela

Education

University of Chicago

PhD in Evolutionary Biology

University of Chicago

MS in Evolutionary Biology

Universidad Simon Bolivar

Licenciado in Marine Biology - Ecology

Skills

Top Skills

Prompt DesignPrompt EngineeringLLM API

Programming Languages

English (Native or Bilingual)Italian (Professional Working)Spanish (Native or Bilingual)Catalan (Elementary)

Publications

Reseñas en línea: lo bueno, lo malo y el contenido

Libro Rojo de la Fauna Venezolana.

Unique experiences are positively associated with the estimated helpfulness of online reviews: the case of small, luxury boutique hotels in the Northern Spanish Wine Route.

Guia de campo de las especies comerciales marinas y de aguas salobres de la costa septentrional de Sur America.

FAO

Supported by the Commission of the European Nations and NORAD. Roma. p. 513 (Spanish and English versions).