My Data Story

There and back again: A Data Journey

Hi, I’m Stephen, a data professional with eight years of experience in data analytics across financial and nonprofit sectors.

I began my data journey on Wall St. at a hedge fund whose primary strategy was trading mortgage derivatives. I started in mortgage research and got to hone my skills in the fundamentals of data analytics—writing custom scripts in Python to create data pipelines, creating and cleaning large datasets for time-series forecasting using SQL and SAS, and exploring mortgage prepayment data to look for trading edges. As a research analyst, I created reports for our portfolio management team to help them make data-driven trading decisions.

A few years in, I joined the portfolio management team after developing a deep understanding of the business and mortgage derivatives. I continued to work on creating analytics tools to help our team take advantage of trading opportunities while managing our portfolio's risk and contributing to our firm's P&L. At the same time, I developed a strong interest in theological studies and eventually decided to pursue grad school.

While in grad school, I joined the staff of a rapidly growing church and found my data muscles being flexed again. Only this time, the question wasn't about how to make the most money but how to best direct our resources to serve our community and care for our members. By using the data skills I had gained on Wall St., I was able to help our church engage our local community in ways that were relevant and meaningful to them.

I love a complete, clean dataset. But more than that, I love using data to help businesses and organizations achieve their goals. If you'd like to work together, let's connect!