Welcome!
I am the Head of Data Science at Shara working on improving financial access to African small businesses.
Please click one of the links below to find out more about me and my work.
About Me
I currently work as the Head of Data Science at Shara, a fintech startup based in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria, working on improving financial access to small and medium size businesses. I lead a team of data scientists and engineers building modern digital financial products for entrepreneurs across Sub-Saharan Africa. Our work blends cutting edge machine learning methods with local context to help our customers grow their businesses.
In addition to my work at Shara, I also advise a variety of firms in machine learning strategy, implementation, and mathematical modelling. Contact me with your questions!
I received my PhD in Applied Mathematics in October 2020 from York University and The Fields Institute in Toronto, where I studied light interaction in skin tissue. My work developed a rigorous understanding of how skin appearance is affected by dynamic physiological processes and has been used to improve imaging-based cardiovascular monitoring. I was supervised by Huaxiong Huang and Steven X. Wang. In addition, I spent a great deal of time working on fetal heart rate monitoring with Martin Frasch, for which I am still passionate about.
My research interests include mathematical modelling of microfinance, credit and banking, pricing and discrimination, asymptotic statistics and limit theorems, light interaction in skin tissue, and change point detection. I have also become keenly interested in data engineering in my professional life and MLOps. I have the non-controversial view that SQL is never going to die.