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Welcome to my website. Here you will find information about me, what I am up to, the projects I have worked on, and things I am passionate about.

About Me

Originally Peruvian, from a small city in the Andes, but have been living between Madrid, california, and London for the past 10 years. I’m fascinated by how humans and organisations make decisions. I am an economist by training, with a postgraduate degree in the intersection between mathematics, economics, and statistics; and interests in psychology and linguistics.

My goal is to use data and technology with a purpose.

What am I up to?

I am a Deployment Strategist at Palantir Technologies, using data to solve some of the world’s most complex problems. I believe thinking critically about data does only give you answers, but more importantly, it allows you to ask the right questions. I try to keep one foot in the technical world, and the other in the human/organisational world.

I have previously worked with England’s National Health Service to help them tackle the long waiting lists in Elective Care, working closely with doctors and non-clinical staff developing and implementing cutting-edge software. You can read more of the work I did here. I have now moved from healthcare into international government.

Outside work

You will usually find me playing guitar (neo-soul / jazz / blues / funk), going to gigs, brewing unnecessarily fancy coffee, reading, taking photographs on old film cameras, playing basketball, geoguessing, and occassionally baking sourdough.

Past experiences

I’ve had the chance of doing several different things through my career. I previously led an analytics vertical at a global food delivery player, responsible of a stream that accounted for over 20M yearly orders and half a billion euros in revenue. I also worked at another major tech company using data to help indie authors make a living out of writing, and developing fraud detection models that saved millions every month. I spent some time working in strategy consulting at one of the top firms, where I had the great opportunity of exploring different industries and project types, from leading smallholder-farming mechanization projects for in East Africa, to performing analytical customer segmentation for a European retail brand. And finally, as a quant in a financial research center, where I worked with academics and hedge funds in building trading algorithms and financial engineering projects for asset pricing simulating stochastic differential equations.

Education

I received a Masters Degree in Econometrics and Mathematical Economics with Distinction from the London School of Economics (more info here), with a full scholarship from the Fundación Ramón Areces. Previously, I earned a BSc in Economics from the Universdad Carlos III de Madrid, graduating summa cum laude. I also spent a year as a visiting student at UC Berkeley.

Most of my work is in R, but some other projects involved using Python, Julia, and MATLAB. Here you will find a VOX EU article I wrote with Jon Danielsson on the comparison of these four languages for economic research (Most read VOX EU piece for a month after its publication).

You can get my CV here.

Contact me

Feel free to reach me at: alvaro@alvaroaguirre.com.
You can also find me on LinkedIn.