Tom Shafer, Ph.D.

Principal Data Scientist

Tom (PhD, Physics) has spent most of his career building computational tools and applying them to complex problems. Working as a Principal Data Scientist at Elder Research, Tom contributes to a diverse collection of projects and clients across the company. Highlights include Bayesian multifactor modeling with Stan, object detection with PyTorch, and network science and graph applications. He enjoys working with many other Elder Research scientists to learn, experiment, and solve interesting problems.

Tom joined Elder Research after completing a PhD in Physics at the University of North Carolina, where he applied high performance computing systems to the study of nuclear radioactive decays. This radioactivity is thought to occur in massive quantities during supernovae and neutron star mergers like those events observed by gravitational wave detectors in recent years.