Ryan McCorvie attended university at the prestigious California Institute of Technology, where he earned a BS degree in Mathematics in 1999. Ryan's coursework included advanced mathematics and mathematical physics, but also topics like artificial life and neural networks. While there, Ryan worked on the Mars Rover at the Jet Propulsion labs. He also worked at the Caltech supercomputing center.

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Ryan McCorvie Bio
Ryan McCorvie
Biography Ryan McCorvie Biography
Ryan McCorvie was born in 1977 in Terre Haute, IN, the son of Terry and Kathleen
McCorvie. Terry moved the family to sunny central Florida after securing a job at
Walt Disney World, and this is where Ryan spent most of his childhood. His
mother Kathleen spent
many years working for
the local newspaper.
Ryan was educated in
the Orlando public
school system,
graduating with an
International
Baccalaureate diploma
from Winter Park High
School. From an early
age he demonstrated a
passion for science and
mathematics. He actively
participated in many
science fairs, science
camps and computer programming competitions. In his senior year was selected
as a member of the U.S. Computing Olympics team. Ryan was also active on the
speech & debate team, attending many tournaments in policy debate.
Ryan McCorvie Education
Ryan McCorvie attended university at the prestigious California Institute of
Technology, where he earned a BS degree in Mathematics in 1999. Ryan's
coursework included advanced mathematics and mathematical physics, but also
topics like artificial life and neural networks. While there, Ryan worked on the
Mars Rover at the Jet Propulsion labs. He also worked at the Caltech
supercomputing center.
After graduating university, Ryan joined the investment bank Goldman, Sachs &
Co. as a Strategist in New York City. His role centered on mathematical modeling
of financial products. In a career spanning more than 13 years he helped build
Ryan McCorvie Biography
rkporter71@gmail.com

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software systems to manage the risk exposures of large portfolios of derivatives
and other financial instruments. In the course of his tenure, he worked on many
different trading desks, including foreign exchange and interest rates. During the
depths of the credit crisis, Ryan was responsible for the team modeling bankruptcy
risk for the corporate bond trading desks. At this time, Ryan managed a global
team of more than 20 programmers and modelers. In 2008 he was promoted to
Managing Director, the firm's highest official title, attained by fewer than 5% of
employees.
While at Goldman Sachs, he split his time between New York City and London.
Ryan enjoys international travel, and he's been to more than a dozen countries.
After leaving Goldman Sachs, Ryan spent part of a year living in Japan, attending
Japanese language school and studying Zen Buddhism. This was his third trip to
Japan, and he attained enough language proficiency to pass the JLPT level 5. He
loved taking his family on tours of the ancient and modern parts of Tokyo, to Meiji
Shrine and to Shinjuku's trendy department stores. While there, he developed a
passion for Japanese cooking, especially for yakitori, a kind of grilled chicken. He
frequented Omoide Yokocho, a small street famous for its yakitori stalls. Upon
returning to the United States, he has participated in classes on Japanese street
cooking, and watched Japanese language cooking shows.
In 2014, Ryan enrolled in
the Statistics Ph.D.
program at UC Berkeley.
His research focused on
random processes that
exhibit crashes or
cascades or contagion.
Ryan believes that
economics lacks good
models to explain financial
panics, and that new
mathematical models may
be able to provide insight. Ryan completed his Ph.D. candidacy exam in 2018,
when he gave a seminar lecture on the Hawkes process. This is a process with
discrete events (for example, "earthquakes") which incorporates feedback cycles
so subsequent events (for example, "aftershocks") become more likely shortly after
an event occurs. His research also focused on high dimensional statistics and
random matrix models, with applications to financial portfolio construction.
Ryan's advisor was Steven Evans, who specializes on probability and stochastic
processes and he also worked with Lisa Goldberg, the head of the Consortium for
Data Analytics in Risk.
Since April 2020, Ryan has been a volunteer for the California Department of
Public Health, working in the group focused on modeling COVID-19 data. Ryan
hopes that superior mathematical modeling can help the government formulate
effective, evidence-based policy responses to the pandemic.

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Ryan is married to Lisa McCorvie, whom he met in 2006 and wed in 2008. Lisa is
also an alumna of Caltech but, despite it being a relatively small school, Ryan and
Lisa did not meet until years later via a mutual acquaintance. She regularly beats
Ryan playing backgammon. Ryan dotes on his two children, twin girls who are
about to enter kindergarten. Lisa and Ryan want them to have a global
orientation, so they have enrolled their children in a Mandarin-immersion school.
Ryan is grateful that during his graduate studies he's had a job with flexible
working hours. He's been able to be very involved in raising his children.
Ryan supports a number of charitable organizations. Some organizations like
Wikipedia and NumFocus help develop software tools and websites for the
common good. Others like the Institute for Justice and the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education are active in litigating on behalf of the rights of
individuals. Ryan and Lisa also support a number of Oakland-based organizations
which benefit the local community, such as Friends of the Oakland Public Library,
the homeless aid organization St Vincent de Paul, the Alameda County Foodbank,
and the Five Keys school for the incarcerated. Ryan is a member of Alcoholics
Anonymous, and for several years was the leader of a local meeting group at the
Rockridge Fellowship. He is a practicing Christian, and a member of the Piedmont
Community Church.
In his free time, Ryan enjoys several hobbies. He is an avid cyclist, both indoors
and outdoors. Ryan also enjoys exploring the natural beauty of the San Francisco
Bay area by going on extended hikes. He is a voracious reader of non-fiction,
especially
popular
science and
contemporary
history. Ryan
has an
extensive
music
collection,
with over
3000 albums,
from genres
spanning
Jazz to Rock
to electronic
dance music.
Solving
puzzles is
also a
passion - from sudoku and ken-ken, to large-scale overnight treasure-hunt puzzle
games like New York's Midnight Madness.

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