My name is [Florian Leitner](About%20me.md). In a nutshell, I have over two decades of experience building information extraction, retrieval, and recommendation systems, from a junior data scientist to an engineering manager level. As a professional, I strive to excel at Theory Y-based leadership, relationship building through conversations and communication, and all and any kind of data analytics (elementary statistics to deep learning). I do that concretely by cultivating an [Agile Strategy](Agile%20Strategy.md) focused on the [5 Lean capabilities](5%20Lean%20Capabilities.md) to maximize the [flow towards client value](Value%20Stream%20Mapping.md). I started my data science career in the life sciences in 2001, applying machine learning to the domains of structural biology, oncology, and neuroscience. In that role, I developed advanced NLP, machine learning, and data mining techniques at Novartis and several renowned European research centers. I have [published](https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=EkXLlysAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra) as first author [in Nature Biotechnology](https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0910-897). Years before Kaggle even existed, I was already organizing [data science community challenges](https://biocreative.bioinformatics.udel.edu/). I have directed an [international research collaboration on distributed text mining](https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gb-2008-9-s2-s6), worked for IT startups, and founded a [data operations consultancy](https://datacatalytics.com). In 2015, I joined [Ryan Terpstra](https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanterpstra/) at Selerity, a FinTech startup based in Manhattan, NY, as a Senior Data Scientist to apply these same techniques to news and documents in finance. Eventually, I [became the organization's CTO](https://www.selerityinc.com/about/). After the acquisition of Selerity by the ION Group, I now am the Head of Machine Learning at [ION Analytics](https://iongroup.com/analytics/). Today, I coach a team of data scientists and engineers on the topics of machine learning, data science, and data engineering (as found in the Science and Technology sections of this knowledge base). I aspire to bring more transparency to the capital markets. With the advent of end-user-friendly large language models, my strategic objective is to convert everyone in the company into self-directed junior data scientists by teaching [The Art of Statistics](https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/294857/the-art-of-statistics-by-spiegelhalter-david/9780241258767) and the use of [prompt engineering](LLM%20Techniques.md). Collaborating with world-class product teams on applying [lean capabilities](5%20Lean%20Capabilities.md) and [agile strategies](Agile%20Strategy.md) to challenges in the biotech and financial domains gives me joy. I hold a PhD in Bioinformatics (with distinction) from the Autonomous University of Madrid in [Alfonso Valencia's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Valencia) lab, where I published the F-measured Average Precision (FAP) [ranking evaluation metric](Ranking%20evaluation%20metrics.md). Please find my [full CV](https://datacatalytics.com/docs/Florian_Leitner_CV.pdf) on [datacatalytics.com](https://datacatalytics.com/), my professional landing site.