Alex McDaniel

Data Science, Analytics, and Machine Learning

My current role is Data Science Manager for the Model Development and Governance team at Purpose Financial. We are a consumer lending company in the non-prime space. The focus of my current work is facilitating the end-to-end devlopment of machine learning models within the data science team and providing a governance framework to maintain the health of our model inventory. Prior to my role leading Model Dev and Governance I worked directly building credit underwriting models for our suite of personal loan products.

Astrophysics Research

Before my time in FinTech, I was a reseracher in astrophysics. Most recently I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physics and Astronomy department at Clemson University (go Tigers!). Prior to Clemson I completed my PhD at UC Santa Cruz. My research was broadly in high energy astrophysics and astro-particle physics. Most of this time was spent studying particle dark matter, cosmic ray propagation, galactic winds, and sites of cosmic-ray acceleration in the Milky Way. I have made extensive use of data from telescopes such as Fermi-LAT at gamma-ray energies as well as Swift, Chandra, and XMM-Newton at X-ray energies. To see my list of publications please visit the Publications page of this site, the NASA ADS Abstract service, or Google Scholar.