About Me
Hello, and welcome! My name is Neil, and I have a PhD in high energy physics. My thesis was a precision mass measurement of the Higgs boson performed in collaboration with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the European Center for Nuclear Research’s (CERN) Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Which is all together too many acronyms, and a mouthful and a half. This was a 7 year effort that allowed me to focus on software engineering and optimization, and it culminated in the most precise measurement of the mass of the Higgs boson to date. The work I contributed to the measurement included redeveloping the precision calibration software used by the CMS electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL) for best-in-class relative energy resolution on electrons and photons used in the analysis, developing an optimization strategy for the categorization of photons used in the analysis to maximize the signal strength and relative resolution of the measurement, and developing novel method of evaluating and minimizing systematic uncertainties affecting the mass of the Higgs boson.
Despite my success in graduate school, I left academia in late 2022 to pursue a job in industry as a machine learning engineer at Sentera, Inc. in an effort to escape the lack of work-life balance and the politics of academia. At Sentera I worked on the R&D side of the Computer Vision Machine Learning (CVML) team to explore and develop methods of outlier detection for a Fortune Global 500 company. The project was very successful, with my novel outlier detection algorithm achieving better than 90% recall and less than 1% false positive rates, and the data pipeline I helped develop reducing turn time from months to five business days. As such the project began to evolve out of the exploration phase and into the hardware/go-to-market phase. During this time I profiled and optimized the outlier detection to reduce computation time per object to less than 40 ms, consulted on necessary hardware specs to ensure a rugged edge deployable system, curated the training data for our segmentation algorithms, and tested and validated many real-time segmentation algorithms including models from the SoloV2, Yolo, and RTMDet families. Then in January of 2024, Sentera went through a strategic workforce reduction due to changing market conditions, and I was out of luck.
While certainly disappointing, that’s the risk one takes at a startup. However, this gave me the time I needed to travel across Europe, roadtrip across the US, get engaged to my wonderful partner, finish my Ph.D. program, and become a machine learning consultant for iSeek Corporation. Now I’m on the hunt for my next opportunity. If you need a machine learning engineer, data scientist/analyst, or Python software engineer please reach out! I’d love to chat about how my skills and experience can help your team use a little science and a lot of data to drive valuable insight.