Hello everyone! It has been a long time since I first joined this community as an undergrad at Baruch college - I created this account in 2007! Much has happened since then, and recently Andy reconnected with me on LinkedIn encouraging me to reconnect. Happy to! Here's my background and what I'm currently working on..
Directly after graduation and seeking self
I graduated Baruch in 2008 with a BA in Mathematics. I'd done several internships in risk management and algorithmic trading while at Baruch and considered joining the MFE program. Dan Stefanica was amazingly supportive of my interest and connected me to his growing network of graduate students. However, two things happened and I decided not to pursue the MFE directly after graduation: the 2008 financial crisis had me skeptical for the future of, at the time, many of the financial products being engineered, and I didn't have confidence in my math and programming skills yet. I wanted a little more work experience first before committing.
I struggled to find quant finance work in NYC after graduation and decided to explore another passion of mine, restaurants and hospitality. I worked very hard in the fine dining scene and eventually worked at Jean Georges at 1 Central Park West. It was incredibly intense and rewarding experience - read about that here in an article I wrote that Slate published
What is it like to be a chef at an expensive restaurant?
Moving to Hartford and entering insurance
Life took me to Hartford, CT. Long story short I got what I wanted from hospitality but it wasn't the career for me - too many hours, too little pay, and didn't satisfy my quantitative intellectual curiosity. I took more programming courses and eventually got a job at Travelers (Hartford is still a major insurance capital) writing algorithms to automate decision systems throughout the company for audit, compliance, internal risk management.
I got a MS in Business Analytics & Project Management at UConn and eventually was given the opportunity to start the first Operations Analytics group within Enterprise Business Intelligence and Analytics division - essentially the operational pulse on the entire Travelers domestic business. I managed a small team focused on operations research and decision automation to improve business processes.
It was during this time my entire perspective on organization dynamics changed. I began to understand companies as dynamical networks of interconnected processes and human input. Travelers sponsored me to attend the
New England Complex Systems Institute Winter School at MIT in 2019 to pursue this type of thinking and see how we could apply that to new models for operations research. Here I learned about complex systems research from some amazing people -
Yaneer Bar-Yam on multi scale complexity,
Blake Lebaron on modeling market microstructures,
Hiroki Sayama on agent-based modeling,
Alfredo J. Morales-Guzman on network modeling and visualization.
My whole way of seeing the world changed and I began to apply systems thinking and principles of complexity science to many problems I encountered in business.
Moving to Santa Fe and leading Data Engineering teams
My wife and I moved to Santa Fe, NM in 2019 and I began the remote work chapter of my career (how little I knew what would come shortly ahead). I was recruited by The Hartford to lead the Data Engineering function within Claims Data Science to automate a huge portion of the claims management lifecycle through predictive models. I had a team of eight direct reports and many other vendor consultants under my management to implement this vision. Phenomenal career and learning experience, ESPECIALLY doing this all through the early, chaotic days of Covid 19.
Starting my PhD and entrepreneurship
My interest in complexity science was just not satiated enough through work experience alone. Yes, some concepts are useful mental models but I had much deeper curiosity in the fundamental aspects of these methods than was needed for most corporate tasks. I applied to the
Systems Science PhD program at BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY and Hiroki Sayama became my advisor. Hiroki had designed the program to cater to curious practitioners like me and I am able to do my coursework and research remotely while living in Santa Fe. My research focus is using models and information theory frameworks from natural and biological systems applied to organizational and human systems. I continue working full-time and doing coursework part-time to satisfy my course requirements.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technology offer a new approach to many of the problems I've been working on over the years - coordination of independent units, process automation, incentive mechanisms for human behaviors, data management. So when I was asked to be co-founder of a blockchain analytics startup
Chainverse I said YES and pursued my path of
adjacent possible.
Climate risk management
I worked on Chainverse for about a year but reached the edge of my personal risk tolerance in summer 2022. By that time my wife and I had our first child and I needed more stability. I amicably left Chainverse and to join Arbol, a parametric insurance and climate derivatives company, to lead the Data Engineering organization. Last year the company wrote $170 million in climate derivatives and insurance products, and my team managed the entire data infrastructure supporting these operations. Our main internal stakeholders are the Risk Modeling and Sales teams.
Before I joined the company spun off
dClimate - web3 oriented data layer for verified climate data. This is a core platform for us so still a lot of my work does focus on using ledger technology and principles of decentralization.
Looking ahead
It's a bit surreal to reconnect with Quantnet after all these years. I write out this journey and credit Baruch and the MFE program (albeit indirectly) for influencing so many foundational aspects to my career. Life is not linear and neither are career paths. And fifteen years after my initial career goals of working in finance I feel like I've finally arrived there with my current role at Arbol.
I see huge opportunities ahead for financial engineering and blockchain to be combined in the operational aspect of complex financial products by tokenizing legal contracts and coordinating the many parties involved in complicated structures using trustless, transparent technologies. My mind is not at rest and I look forward to working on some really big ideas that will have huge impact on the nature of financial operations.
Connect with me
LinkedIn
Twitter
@c_lemp
My newsletter:
Emergent Outcomes where I write about business, technology, and complexity science research
Cheers all
