About

FuzzyOffice

(Get my resume here.)

I am a mathematical modeler and analyst with over ten, post-PhD years of experience with statistical and machine learning techniques, optimization (mostly nonlinear/nonsmooth programming but some linear too), game theoretic modeling, and programming for high-performance computing (HPC). I have extensive coding experience python, javascript, terraform, yes bash, even C/C++/FORTRAN and matlab,  “*nix” environments including remote clusters, cloud services (especially AWS but also GCP), service containerization, and kubernetes. I’ve published papers on, given talks in, and taught optimization, game theory, statistics, machine learning, and physical modeling. My primary academic domain experience was in automotive markets, alternative fuel vehicles, and transportation policy particularly related to fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions regulations. I am also an expert in discrete choice modeling and related statistical estimation problems, and focused as an academic on “tough” optimization (nonlinear, non-convex, and or non-smooth problems); programming for high performance computing, in serial and distributed environments. In tech, I’m interested in software design and operation in the interfaces between computing infrastructure, algorithms, data engineering, and ordinary day-to-day practices. I’m also a painter. 

I have a PhD, MS, and BS in Mechanical Engineering, as well as a MS in Applied Math, from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. During 2008-2009 was a postdoctoral researcher in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a lecturer at MIT, followed by 5 years as a tenure-track faculty at Iowa State University (Mechanical Engineering and Economics). More on that below. 

Recently I had a short stint as a Software Engineer at the Floating Point Group, a unique company focusing on order execution, custodial services, settlement, and access in currently fragmented and rapidly evolving blockchain asset markets. Previously I have been a (Senior) Software Engineer at Bond Financial Technologies and (Staff) software engineer at metromile with responsibilities spanning software engineering, data engineering, and platform/DevOps. I’ve worked on standing up and maintaining both AWS and GCP infrastructure, a lot of kubernetes as well as managed services, RESTful and gRPC web services, kafka, CI/CD, data engineering with postgres, kafka, druid, trino, BigQuery, and even some dynamodb and even data accessibility with retool. 

Before these roles I was a Research Computing Specialist and Developer on the DARC team in The Research Hub at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. In this role I supported GSB faculty research in a variety of subject matter domains and analytics tools. I also led efforts in research computing infrastructure and web applications for internal use as well as online behavioral experiments. My main, specific areas of work were:

  • High-performance computing (particularly for statistics and structural modeling), in serial and in parallel environments
  • Full-stack web app development (in node.js/react) for online human subjects experiments and internal services
  • “DevOps” and monitoring for on-premise and cloud computing (including compute & storage)
  • Database technologies (serverless query engines like Athena, time-series databases like influxdb) and the infrastructure behind them,
  • Security (encryption, identify verification, secure compute environments)

From December 1st, 2014 through July 2016 I worked at Ford Motor Company’s Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto. I was part of Ford Global Data Insights & Analytics, a new organization tasked with reorganizing data and analytics across Ford. I conceived of and carried out research projects, undertook business-critical analytics, presented to corporate executives including the CEO, CTO, CIO, CFO, and CDAO (Chief Data and Analytics Officer), and sought out new business relationships in Silicon Valley. In January 2016, I was promoted to GDI&A’s Site Leader in Palo Alto, but ultimately found this too managerial. 

From 2009-2014 I worked as a faculty member at Iowa State University in the Mechanical Engineering and Economics departments. As a former academic, professor, and policy researcher I have strong communication skills (written reports, teaching, peer review, public speaking, media coverage); have overseen research projects with budgets of $400,000; and was awarded over $1.3 Million in competitive federal project funding during my 5 years as a faculty (reflecting a 60% grant funding hit rate, in an NSF division with a 20% average). I ultimately found faculty career requirements are not aligned with my interest in focusing my time on solving hard and large scale computational problems, most research communities somewhat divorced from pragmatic reality, and was generally disappointed with the quality of work broadly accepted as useful academic research. 

I have a strong record of professional service, as well. I co-founded and organized Ford’s RIC Palo Alto Seminar Series, a successful seminar series dedicated to bringing Silicon Valley expertise to a global Ford audience. I co-conceived, co-organized, and co-executed CCBTEP 2014, an NSF-sponsored workshop on Complex Choice Behaviors and Transportation Energy Policy. I’ve proposed, organized, and moderated special sessions in professional conferences for engineering design and marketing science. I have also been a Peer Reviewer for numerous academic journals and have served on federal grant review panels.

More info about my experience at LinkedIn or in my resume. You can contact me at morrowwr@gmail.com. I post (an unfortunately tiny amount of) shareable code on github. If you want to know what I can do, let’s talk or just build something.