Rick Lawrence Email and Phone Number

Rick’s career has evolved from nuclear science to machine learning to quantitative finance to COVID data science. Most recently, he has given a number of general audience talks and interviews on generative AI and ChatGPT in particular.Rick plays competitive golf, and was the Connecticut State Golf Association One-Day Series Senior Player of the Year in 2023.From 2020-2023, Rick served as COVID Data Scientist for the Ridgefield (CT) COVID-19 Task Force, where he developed data science models to understand the impact of public policy and vaccination on the progression of the virus. As part of this work, Rick did a number of local cable interviews where he provided data-driven analysis to help people make informed healthcare decisions.From 2016-2019, Rick was President, PCIX Inc., a New York City VC-funded startup that used machine learning to extract quantitative insight on the relationship between private-equity transactions and the performance of public markets. Rick was responsible for setting the strategic direction of the company as well as leading the development of the underlying technology. He led a successful second-round VC raise, and personally implemented several machine-learning-based trading algorithms and assessed their backtest performance via rigorous Monte Carlo simulations. PCIX was dissolved in March 2019, after failing to raise another round of capital.Prior to joining PCIX in 2016, Rick was Distinguished Research Staff Member, and Senior Manager, Machine Learning & Decision Analytics, within the Cognitive Computing organization at IBM Research at Yorktown Heights NY. In this role, he led a number of research initiatives involving innovative applications of machine learning in areas including non-factoid question-answer systems, analysis of social media, quantitative finance, and product recommendation systems.Dr. Lawrence has published over 100 technical papers spanning computational neutron transport methods, high-performance computing, data mining, and machine learning. Rick received his B.S. degree from Stanford University and his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Illinois. Before joining IBM in 1987, he led the Neutronics Methods group in the Applied Physics Division of Argonne National Laboratory. He is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Societies.